Christianity
The Parousia: The Return of Jesus Christ
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, November 10, 1999
The Return of Jesus
Few Biblical scholars deny that every New Testament writer and the members of the first century Church expected Christ to return within their lifetime. For nearly 2000 years, the Church has continued eagerly expecting and proclaiming the return of Jesus Christ, “soon!”
If the first Christians expected the Parousia “soon” and 2000 years later Christians are still expecting it “soon”, does “soon” mean anything that we understand? Well, yes it does. It means that the Christians have been wrong all along. If Christians were misguided or wrong on such a crucial issue as Christ’s return, how can anyone believe anything they say? Can they be trusted to tell us the truth about salvation and immortality?
They have turned to their old habit. They make excuses. Conservative scholarship postulates that Jesus’s coming again has been delayed or postponed. Liberal scholarship reckons Jesus and the New Testament writers were simply mistaken or deluded. Other liberals think Jesus never made statements implying imminence. These words were altered or added later by his followers. Informed critics of Christianity have no trouble seeing right through the strained attempts of Church leaders to explain away why Jesus did not return as promised, and to protect Jesus’s credibility and divinity. Such weak attempts open the door to questioning the authenticity of many other sayings of Christ and the infallible guidance of the Holy Ghost.
Are Christians blind to the implications of “non-return”? Most Christians do not realize the predicament they are in. Christianity is hardly credible if the firmest, clearest prophecy of the son remains unfulfilled.
John Noe, an evangelic theologian, having struggled with the problem of the absent Parousia and its implications, has decided Christians have struggled unnecessarily. There is no escaping the truth. Christians were wrong to wait for 2000 years for a Parousia while trying to uphold Biblical inerrancy, Papal infallibity, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and other hard acts the Christian sects impose upon themselves.
Noe’s astonishing answer is that Jesus did return within the generation which was alive during his earthly ministry, just as and when he said he would. He seems to think this answer is a frightening new discovery. Yet, if Jesus has returned already, why was the event so insignificant that most of the world did not notice any profound influence on the world since, unless it is that cruelty, torture and weaponry have expanded along with theft, skulduggery and destruction of the world until the world is for billions of people unbearable? Is this the impact of the return?
For us, Noe gives from a fundamentalist Christian viewpoint all the good evidence why Jesus was wrong (though he argues Jesus was not). Here we gratefully use some of the arguments of this Christian in support of the view that Jesus indeed expected the miracle of God to renew the world… then!
Skeptical Response
Critics note the dilemma Christians face and the impossibility of escaping it without being disloyal to Christ:
• The atheist, Bertrand Russell, in his book, Why I Am Not A Christian, discredits the inspiration of the New Testament:
Christ… certainly thought that his second coming would occur in clouds of glory before the death of all the people who were living at the time. There are a great many texts that prove it… where it is quite clear that he believed that his coming would happen during the lifetime of many then living. That was the belief of his earlier followers, and it was the basis of a good deal of his moral teaching.
• In The Quest of the Historical Jesus Albert Schweitzer, the Christian doctor, summarized it this way:
The whole history of Christianity down to the present day… is based on the delay of the Parousia, the non-occurrence of the Parousia, the abandonment of eschatology, the process and completion of the “de-eschatologizing” of religion which has been connected therewith.
• Jewish critics contend Jesus did not do what the Messiah was supposed to do—introduce the kingdom of God. That is why he is not the Messiah of the Jews, merely the Messiah of the gentiles, and since there was never ever any prophecy of a Messiah of the gentiles, gentiles can draw their own conclusion, but the inference is plain!
• Most Muslims acknowledge Jesus as a prophet, but seek to discredit him as a god and destroy the credibility of Christianity by pointing out his failure to return. Either the apostles lied, or Jesus was wrong about his imminent return and the inauguration of the kingdom of God. If the latter, he was a prophet all right, but a false one.
• Even in the New Testament people with a brain scoffed (2 Peter 3:3,4; Jude 16-19) that nothing had happened, nothing changed: “Where is this coming he promised?” as they say in 2 Peter. These scoffers doubted the sureness of Christ’s promise, viewed Christianity as a perversion of Israel’s future, and the Christian reaction to them was to call them “the ungodly” who, according to Jude would be purged by 10,000 holy ones. The mortal sin was already not accepting the Christian god, not any of the awful things that could have been cited like slavery or crucifixion itself, not banned until the time of Constantine, and then because of its holy connotation not its cruelty as a punishment. In the times of 2 Peter and Jude the delay of the Parousia was only about a century. History has proven the scoffers right—2000 years later Christians are still saying, “soon”.
• Even Christians inadvertantly join their own critics because the standard Christian answer to the non-happening Parousia has been to insist Jesus will come again, someday! But this proves the critics’ point—Jesus was incorrect in his prophecies of returning soon and cannot be the Messiah. In fact, Noe himself falls into a similar category because he openly admits the criticisms. That he thinks he has the answer does not matter because neither Christian nor critic of Christianity will believe him.
Jesus’s Clear Prophecies of the End
Jesus’s own statements on the matter left no doubts. In frequent statements, he confirmed the certainty of the eschatological coming and when. At face value, these words of Jesus are some of the clearest in the New Testament. Otherwise, they are puzzling or meaningless. The only doubt in them to a non-Christian is who was supposed to come. No Christian will consider anyone but the man himself, but this aspect is less than clear.
Matthew 26:64. Quoting from the prophet Daniel, Jesus responded to and forewarned the high priest and the Sanhedrin saying:
In the future you shall see the son of man sitting on the right hand of Power, and coming on the clouds of heaven.
Jesus’s “you” meant his audience not twenty first century fundamentalists. He was speaking in the first-person, directly to them, the audience. Caiaphas, the high priest, and all present were familiar with this biblical language. They were the ones who would “see” his return in catastrophic judgement and his glory displayed in the destruction of their religious institutions. How could Jesus possibly have been describing an event some 2000 years in the future? The text demands immediate impact and fulfilment in their lifetime.
Matthew 10:23. While talking with his disciples, Jesus declared,
But whenever they persecute you in this city, flee to the next: for truly, I say to you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel, before the Son of man comes.
The obvious meaning of Jesus’s words was not to deceive his disciples, but to assure them that during the persecution which was to soon to come upon “them”, they would not run out of places to flee for safety before he returned. This was another failed prophecy for they returned from their missionary tour and the son of man had not arrived meanwhile.
Matthew 16:28. He informed his disciples:
For truly, I say to you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the son of man coming in his kingdom.
Here, Jesus is describing the same event. A 40-year period was to transpire between the time he ascended to heaven and the son of man came back in the post-crucifixion revision of Nazarene eschatalogical hopes. During that time some of his disciples would have died, but others remained alive.
Matthew 24:30,34. Jesus repeats his promise in the mini-apocalypse:
At that time the sign of the son of man will appear in the sky, and all the nations of the earth will mourn. They will see the son of man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory… I tell you the truth, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.
Jesus here uses the very same phrase his disciples had just heard him speak to the scribes and Pharisees when he told them the guilt of the blood of the righteous would fall upon “this generation” (Mt 23:35-36). Jesus’s “this generation”, in every New Testament usage, always means the contemporaries of Jesus alive at that time.
Luke 21:6,22,27,32. In the parallel passages in Luke’s gospel, the message is repeated again. If Jesus did not mean the words to say he would return within a generation, why did he plainly make it sound as if he did, so plainly that the gospel writers write it down even when they knew it was already untrue. If it happened at all it happened in the first century, and could not have been omitted from the gospels because Christians had been taught it for half a century at the minimum. It was included because it could not be left out and, ever since, Christians have had to excuse it.
If Jesus was wrong, he was a false prophet, not a prophet of God (Dt 18:21-22), nor the Messiah. There is no honest way to escape it. The texts demand it and Christians find themselves in an impossible bind—though it has never bothered most of them one whit. He will come “soon”, is their mindless mantra. In a sort of defence they appeal to “of that day and hour knoweth no man” (Mt 24:36; 25:13). The period of gestation of an animal is known quite precisely but no one knows exactly when a birth will happen. This is Jesus’s point in this statement, not that Christians might still be waiting 2000 years later. That he is telling his disciples to be ever watchful because nobody knows exactly when the moment will be, actually adds to the immediacy of the message. It does not preclude nor override its urgency or the imminence of the appearance of one like unto the son of man on the clouds of heaven.
Expectations of Jesus’s Followers
All of the following quotations highlight the imminency of the coming, but do not forget that at the time of Jesus there was only one Lord—God! The “coming of the Lord” was the coming of God—God’s visitation at the End Time. Only by promoting their crucified leader to the level of God did the Christians change the coming from that of God to that of Jesus:
• James told the first century followers of Christ to be patient until the coming of the Lord. “The coming of the Lord draweth nigh”, and “the judge standeth before the door” (Jas 5:8-9). The Greek translated “nigh” is literally “within grasp”, sometimes translated as “at hand.” Jesus used “at hand” too, denoting readiness or availability (Mt 4:17; 10:7; also 26:18,45,46; Jn 2:13) with the same obvious meaning. Were James’s readers to interpret his use of this adverbial phrase to mean 2000 years? James’s “at hand” has the same immediacy as Jesus’s.
If those Christians are correct that claim God’s timescale is much longer than ours (2 Pet 3:8), then there is no getting away from the truth that God or His prophets are fooling Christians, for God’s words become devoid of meaning to mankind or mean the opposite to our understanding. The earnest evangelical Noe says that for God to inspire men to write words that meant nearness and imminence to man, but in reality meant a long time is deceitful double-talk. Meanings stretched a thousand years or to protect a theological bias are deceitful.
• The writer of Hebrews wrote:
In just a very little while, he who is coming will come and will not delay.Heb 10:37
He also wrote: “As you see the day approaching” (Heb 10:25). 2000 years is longer than the covenant nation of Israel even existed in myth, let alone history, so is this what the author meant when he spoke to these people of “a very little while”? None of Jesus’s parables depicting the Lord’s coming suggest a potentially “long” time.
It was the evil servant who says “My Lord delayeth his coming” (Mt 24:48).
• Paul blatantly led his contemporaries to believe that some of them would survive and still be “alive and left” on planet earth and urged that their bodies (soma not sema) should be “kept blameless” until the coming of the Lord (1 Thes 4:17; 5:23-24). If they all died without receiving Paul’s promise, and their bodies were not kept but decayed in graves, then has the inspiration of the Holy Ghost not failed, too? Paul further told Timothy to “keep the commandment… until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Tim 6:14).
In all of Paul’s writings including 1 Corinthians 15, he evidently had no need to clarify that he was referring to the nearness of any other coming or end different from that taught by Jesus. Paul clearly anticipated the imminent return of Christ in his lifetime and in the lifetime of his hearers. The plain grammatical meaning of Paul’s often-used “we” (1 Thess 4:15-17), and the saturation of his epistles with nearness expectations and exhortations, allow no other conclusion (Rom 13:12; Phil 4:5; Gal 4:4; 1 Cor 7:29,31).
• The two epistles attributed to Peter also exhort their readers to holy living and to hang in there for “a little while” (1 Pet 1:6; 5:10). This was to be “unto a salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time, in which you exult, yet a little while, if need be, grieving in manifold trials” (1 Pet 1:5) of “these last times” (1 Pet 1:20). Peter is referring to the same identical, first century time frame as all the other New Testament writers. That is why throughout, Peter employs the personal pronoun “you.” Peter’s “you” in its normal, face-to-face, customary context means his contemporary audience, not an abstract reader anywhere, anytime.
Here, and elsewhere, whenever modern-day Christian interpreters have to stray away from the normal meaning of words or create new definitions of familiar and natural words apart from their customary usage, they are admitting, whilst trying to disguise it, that something is dreadfully wrong with their religious foundation. We are invited to believe that the New Testament writers were addressing whoever would experience these eschatological events living in or beyond the twenty first century, and that all earlier Christians have been admittedly deluded to imagine it might mean them. They were addressed to people alive then and there. In no stretch of the imagination could 2000 years be Peter’s “a little while”, or justify his sense of urgency for his target audience.
• Jesus’s coming was often compared to “like a thief” (Mt 24:43; 1 Thess 5:2; 2 Pet 3:10; Rev 3:3; 16:15). The reason for the thief comparison was that no one could know the precise time when they would be burgled. Jesus’s followers would not be caught off guard (1 Thess 5:4). His disciples could watch and see “the day” approaching by discerning the signs. Others “slept” and did not discern the signs (Heb 10:25; 1 Thess 5:5-6).
Moreover, Paul wrote and admonished first century believers that that day should not overtake “them” as a thief (1 Thess 5:4). No one is bothered about a thief coming in the distant future. A warning about a thief has to apply to “now” or a time that will soon become “now”, not a time 2000 years or more hence. A 2000-year delay violates both the imagery, sense of urgency and contemporary significance of this simile.
The “this generation” imminency of the coming of the son of man was the central motif of New Testament teaching and the uniform expectation of the early Church. Just how many times, in how many ways, and using how many inspired words and phrases must the New Testament express this first century imminency before Christians cease persisting in their lies? This language of nearness is very significant and plainly forbids the passing of a protracted period of time.
Biblical Precedents
Behold he cometh with the clouds.Rev 1:7
“Coming on the clouds” is used of Old Testament portrayals of God descending from heaven and coming in power and glory to act in deliverance of his people or to execute judgment on wicked nations and cities. God habitually came on a cloud because the Hebrew god, Yehouah, was originally a sky and storm god like Baal of the Canaanites. Sky gods always, naturally, have a sun aspect and normally it is the sun that becomes dominant. All of the descriptions of the god of the Hebrews and Christians are descriptions of the sun. But sun gods, sky gods and storm gods, manifest themselves in the heavens through the clouds and when they do, they “come on the clouds”.
The nature of the Hebrew god is plainly given in Genesis where he leaves his bow in the clouds as a token of His covenant with His people. What is a bow in the clouds? The rainbow is a manifestation of the sun and sky and storm god. God is found in clouds in many places in the scriptures (Gen 9:13,14,16; Ex 13:21,22; 14:19,24; 16:10; 19:9,16; 24:15,16,18; 34:5; 40:34-38; Lev 16:2; Num 9:15-22; 10:34; 11:25; 12:5; 14:14; 16:42; Dt 5:22; Judges 5:4; 2 Sam 22:12; 23:4; 1 Kg 8:10-11; 2 Chr 5:13-14; Job 22:13-14; 26:9; 36:32; 37:15; Psalms 18:11;69:34; 77:17; 104:3; 147:8; Isa 14: 14:19:1; Lam 3:44; Ez 1:28; 10:4; Dan 7:13; Nahum 1:3; Zeph 1:15; Zech 10:1).
There are many more references to clouds in the scriptures and the same nimbic metaphors are applied in the New Testament, often in the same sense as in the Old, referring to God, but usually interpreted by Christians to mean Jesus and sometimes explicitly so. The popular one for Christians, though, is that from Daniel. With this nimbic chariot imagery of “coming on the clouds”, the son of man was prophesied by the author of Daniel to come (Dan 7:13):
I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days, and they brought him near before him.
If this is not proof that the one prophesied in Daniel is God, considered as the sun in the sky, then what is? Not Jesus but the later Christians, who had already taken him as a manifestation of God, put into Jesus’s mouth the image of him “coming on the clouds” at the end of the age in his Olivet Discourse.
No Christian bothers that this “prophecy” speaks of “one like” the son of man, not the Son of Man. It is the traditional way in which dreams were described and the verse quoted says it was a “vision.” It means simply that the author of Daniel had a dream of a figure that looked like a man. A son of man could not be a cow or an angel. A “son of man” was a fashionable way of saying a man. Americans today have a similar but insulting expression that means a man is a dog.
“Son of Man” was the expression that Jesus used to mean a “man”, but Christians prefer to convince themselves it was Jesus’s self awareness of godhood. If this were the case, in logic, Jesus might have called himself a son of God, though he never did. But his habit of using a polite faddish expression as a circumlocution—his, perhaps Essene, view of derekh eretz (good manners)—was seen as his equating himself with Daniel’s vision.
In fact, Daniel explicitly tells us, someone in the appearance of a man he saw in another vision was Gabriel. How then is Gabriel the same as Jesus? In fact, in the pseudepigraph called Daniel, the “prince” (of Dan 10:13,21;12:1) most closely matches the one who would have a kingdom in Daniel 7:13. The prince was called Michael, not Jesus. Fundamentalists will have to explain all these aliases that Jesus used, if this is him as well.
Jesus was a law abiding Jew who would not have blasphemed God by saying he was God. Even if Jesus were God in disguise, he could not have broken the law already given by Himself, as God, to Moses face to face. How could God encourage the Jews to stick rigidly to his laws, cruelly punish them when they stumbled, yet appear himself on earth in the form of a man to tell them to break them, and then, though men were not allowed to claim to be God, go around, still in the form of a man, saying he was God?
Even if he was, how could the Jews do anything other than say he was blaspheming, since any man saying he was God was blaspheming (even if he was God in disguise), and blasphemy was against God’s own law? Since men were not supposed to speak like this, can any Christian blame the Jews for not believing a man who did, and can they explain how they themselves could distinguish God in the form of an ordinary man from a faker making the same claims? The law itself forbids any just God from playing such silly games.
Furthermore, in all the biblical comings of God in the Old Testament, God was apparently never visible, but manifested himself in other ways, through His Presence or Glory and various symbols. The Jewish concept of a theophany seems not to be based on the way modern Christians have been conditioned to think of Christ’s “coming on the clouds”. But every biblical instance of coming on a cloud is God coming! If Jesus, and not merely the authors of the New Testament, used this “cloud” language in his prophecies—he was prophesying the coming of God, not his own return. This is proved by the meaning of the word “Parousia”, which is a theophany of God, not a return of some man saying he will.
Apocalyptic Language
The writers of the New Testament also used other apocalyptic language from the Old Testament prophets to describe the coming “day of the Lord”. Noe tries to pretend that the “day of the coming of the Lord” or the “day of the vengeance of the Lord” are just expressions meaning any of the calamatous punishments God meted upon his Chosen or their enemies. He tries to make out that this apocalyptic language is used to describe real events caused by the direct intervention of God which cannot be fully comprehended in human language. But it is specifically the event that the Christians are supposed to be waiting for—the Day of Judgement. Examples he gives are examples of apocalyptic prophecies by such as Isaiah, Ezekiel, Joel and so on.
Noe has begun his own apology, which is that such language just meant pretty awful events but not the end of the present imperfect world. In this way he prepares the reader for his thesis that the “Day of the Lord” happened when the temple was destroyed by the Romans. The universe did not end and God did not appear visibly, on a cloud or otherwise, but that is what it was—the Parousia! And no one even noticed!
Noe adds that only understood in this way, could the Thessalonians (2 Thess 2:1-2) have been confused that that “the day of the Lord” had already come. Yet, the Christian gospels, particularly Matthew, try to give the illusion that some of these cosmic occurrences actually happened at the crucifixion, and even Noe agrees that a forty year period was involved in the final period of settlement, so why should the Thessalonians have not been confused, if they had been told such things?
Jesus himself expected the Day of the Lord’s Vengeance in the garden of Gethsemane. It never happened and Jesus was crucified instead. But when the corpse apparently rose from the dead by disappearing, they thought that the risen Jesus had initiated the coming of the kingdom as the first fruits of the dead. So, it is quite conceivable that early Christians thought the “Day of God’s Vengeance” had come with the rising of Jesus but yet had to be completed after forty years of cosmic battle. They would have been happy as many modern Christians are that God has a different concept of a “day” from us, after all 2 Peter said so.
Noe urges us to think like first century Jewish believers, who were much more apocalyptic-oriented than we are. They knew that behind every descriptive symbol, image or figure of speech was a literal reality. When the “day of the Lord” came, they would recognize it. Inadvertently, Noe is describing one sect, the sect of apocalyptic Jews who would indeed think in this way—the Essenes. We must think like Essenes, we are urged, to understand the earliest Christians. That is because Jesus himself was one.
Parousia
New Testament writers confirmed they were then living in those “last days” (Heb 1:2; Acts 2:17; 1 Tim 4:1; 2 Tim 3:1; Jas 5:3; 2 Pet 3:3; Jude 18; 1 Jn 2:18), when Isaiah prophesied that the Messiah would come robed “with the garments of vengeance” (Isa 59:17), and he would proclaim not only salvation but, “the day of vengeance of our God” (Isa 61:2). Jesus’s statement in Luke’s Olivet Discourse contains this very wording, “When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, you will know that its desolation is near… flee… For these be the days of vengeance in which all things that are written must be fulfilled” (Lk 21:20-22). Noe is losing the thread here because he has just convinced us that the “day” was immediate, in the words of Jesus and his contemporaries (see above) yet now is saying “immediate” is forty years in the future. He takes this to be 66-70 AD, the Jewish War and the destruction of the temple.
70 AD, for Noe, epitomises everything Jesus promised. As this historical time approached, James said, “The Judge is standing at the door.” And, “The coming of the Lord is at hand” (Jas 5:9,8). How long in our traditional view are we going to leave Judge Jesus standing at the door? Paul reminded his readers, “the time is short” (1 Cor 7:29). How long is short, anyway? Peter in perfect, first century harmony proclaimed, “The end of all things is at hand” (1 Pet 4:7), and warned, “For the time has come for judgment to begin at the house of God” (1 Pet 4:17). Urgency permeates Peter’s sense of expectation. He is emphatic, “the time has come”! John wrote in his day: “it is the last hour!” (1 Jn 2:18b).
The issue that is missed is that Jesus died expecting the “Day of the Vengeance of God” in the garden of Gethsemene, after the Lord’s supper. He expected and clearly says he would not drink new wine until he was in the kingdom of God. He expected the kingdom of God that very night. It did not arrive and the followers had to revise their ideas quickly. It would arrive within a generation of the disappearance of Jesus’s corpse—the cosmic battle of the heavenly hosts led by the prince of Israel, Michael, against the prince of darkness, Satan, would take forty years.
It is all clear, if we are not looking through the distorting glass that Christians have put between the events then and now. There is no need to explain away any of the above scriptures. For forty years after the crucifixion, all early Christians, Paul included, expected a Parousia, but Jesus was substituted for Michael. Michael might always have been seen, for Essenes, as the heavenly double (fravashi) of Jesus, so when Michael came with the heavenly hosts, it was Jesus returning.
First century believers watched, waited and eagerly expected in vain (1 Pet 1:5-9; 2:12; Heb 9:28; 10:25; Lk 21:28; Phil 3:20; Gal 5:5; Rom 13:11-13; 1 Cor 1:7; Tit 2:11-13).
The technical word most often used in the New Testament to speak of his coming/return is the Greek word, Parousia. Although it is most often translated “coming”, its primary meaning is “presence”, it being the presence of God in a theophany. Noe wants to assure us that Jesus is with us because he returned in 70 AD when the temple was destroyed. That was his sign. Nobody noticed because God is invisible, but every Christian declares “Jesus lives”, so he must have returned sometime.
These desperate theories are all because, no Christian can face the obvious, though the evangelical Noe gets close to it in his curious arguments—Jesus was a false prophet according to scripture. All the Jews know it. Jesus himself knew it. Only his followers do not know it, and their priests and preachers have been agitatedly obfuscating the truth for 2000 years. They have to be congratulated on their success in so doing. They are the world’s best ever liars—they’ll meet all their best friends when they die, but in a warmer place than they expect.
Comments
Mike I find it difficult not to call you an ignorant and a man that does not know God because you falsely accuse christians of being liars when many Christians are not taught to think the way that Hebrews think some of them hang on every word their pastor say because this is how they were trained. Learning the word of God is not something you gain over night you have to search and study and find out what the writer was talking about or who the writer was talking to.
Jesus did come back as the holy ghost on the day of penetecost as he promised which was 40-50 days after he left the word paraclete means one that is the same. There is only one God men that are not in the spirit cannot look at God and live. When God came to the earth and was born in a house of clay called Jesus/emmanuel (which means God with us) he was not in his full glory this was why men could look at him and live on the earth. Some of the Jews did not accept him because they were descendants of Satan (remember) he told them that they are of their father the and his works they will do. You can also read in John chap 7 or 8 and see that some did accept him also on the day of pentecost some accepted. Jesus told them that they were not his sheep because his sheep know his voice and a stranger’s voice they will not follow.
You should try to refrain from calling God’s people liars and throwing your judgemental statements about. If you cause anyone to turn away from God you are going to give account to God like all other false teachers. If you have questions why not ask I am willing to give you the scriptures. But to call a person a liar because they don’t have the correct understanding is to extreme.
Jesus has full right to call himself God because he is. In the beginning was the word and the word was GOD and the word was with GOD and the WORD/GOD became flesh (Jesus) and dwelt among us. You cannot explain God by trying to reduce him to how you think you must be born from above and be elevated to how he thinks then and only then can you understand him. Jesus was not a false prophet according to scripture. The New Testament was somewhat different from the Old because God brought what he wanted to do to it’s fullest you cannot. He said the old testament was flawed not because it was in error but because it was not the complete thought that God was trying to convey to men. In the Old Testament the law was given in the new Testament the law was written on mens hearts (mind) as stated as ther conscience.
The bible also tells you that the Old Testament was written for our example and that he did not come to destroy it but to fulfill it the simplest way I can put it is that God wanted men to see all of what he thought and not some of it. This is why the new testamaent says that if you love you fulfiill the whole law. Because love which is in or not in a person’s heart/mind is the thing that determines what a human being will do. In the old testament men had to keep the law which was the out side or physical side of the commandments. But if it was not in their heart/mind they would keep doing what was in their heart hence they had to sacrifice goats and rams etc to be forgiven. In the New Testament God made the ultimate sarifice himself so that all men could have access to his spirit so that they could live according to the spirit and take on his nature so that they could live as he wants them to. If you would like to study further let me know have a good day.
You tell me all this in a continuous stream of passion, questioning why I call Christians liars, but you tell me it all without being able to show me why it should be true… any of it. It just tumbles out in a stream as if it were all self evident, even though it is rather incoherent. Why should I believe any of it? You want to assure me it is true, but you are a Christian, and Christians are liars. Unless you can show me why all this should be believed, then you are a liar.
You say Christians are innocent of being liars because they behave as their pastors taught them. Why is that an excuse for lying. Are their pastors lying? In my view, if pastors are teaching Christians wrongly, then it is out of their own ignorance, or it is deliberate. They are then lying. If Christians are meant to search and study to find out what is true, then they should do it. What stops them? How do you know that I haven’t searched and studied but found out that it is all nonsense? You assume that by searching and studying we shall find out that all of this stream of fantasy is true, but search and study is more likely to show you that it is all wrong. That is why pastors and priests are liars. They know that anyone who seriously searches and studies will find out that Christianity is lies. Nothing upholds it other than the determination to believe it whatever else might be true. That is considered utterly praiseworthy by the Christian liars, the priests and pastors, because they know it is an absolute barrier to proper searching and studying. Faith means that whatever the searching and studying finds out will be rejected unless it matches the tenets of a preconceived faith.
You list several things as being unequivocally true, but how do you know they are true? Are you God? You are simply relating something that you read in a book, or perhaps only heard from a priest or pastor. How do you know it is true unless you are God Himself? You do not know. The book might have been written by a devil, but you believe what someone, priest, pastor or parent told you, and they had themselves learnt it from the same types of people. So, none of you know what you are telling others is true. You believe it is true. You have faith it is true, but you do not know it is true. You are all therefore liars. You will see that I can explain why I call Christians liars, but you cannot tell me why they are not. You cannot give me any sound assurance that your stream of assertions is true. If any of it is, then it is purely by accident that you are telling the truth about those bits, but you have no idea which are the true bits of your assertions and which are false. It is better in such circumstances to take it as all false.
What then would be the point of my asking you questions about your falsehoods. All I will get is more falsehoods. You seem certain that God will punish me, and you will be rewarded. What makes you so sure about that? Any God worth His salt will never accept lies or those who tell them. The very basis of goodness is truth and honesty. Christians cannot be relied upon to be either, and they certainly cannot be so relied upon in their own beliefs, because that is all they are… beliefs… unfounded beliefs, simply accepted as being true to justify yourselves. Yet the Devil has all the best tunes, the old saying has it, and you have no idea you are not singing them for him. Hatred can be no part of a good God, but your God hates Jews, and so do you. You may deny it, but in your screed above you suggest it is true, and Christianity has always thought so.
People might relate untruth simply because they are ignorant, as you suggest, but it is no reason to believe them in their assertions. But no Christian will be corrected. They are ignorant but are certain from their faith that they are right. They therefore remain liars, and your defence of them is again false. You say Christ was God but do not say why you are so certain, simply giving interminable quotes from the book you take to be true without examination. The book could as easily, more easily, be false than true, and could more easily have been written by wicked men than by God. Such considerations do not impress you, but to ignore them is again to be spreading lies, spreading stories that you simply do not know are true, and that are more likely to be false, as if they were unquestionably true.
Repeatedly you say things are so as if you were God Himself, for only a God could know it. You are a bit presumptious, are you not, to assert what only God knows. Then you tell blatant lies, depending on other people’s trust in you as a supposedly honest Christian, and their ignorance of the bible, to say that the scripture affirms that Jesus was not a false prophet, when the scripture does the exact opposite. The false prophet prophesies that which is not true, that which does not happen, and that, the scripture plainly tells us, is what a false prophet is. Jesus said the kingdom of God would happen within a generation, and that then he would return at his parousia. It did not happen, and it does not suffice to say that it will yet happen when it was prophesied two thousand years ago. Plainly God in the Old Testament said that the false prophet would be judged in his own lifetime because they would know within that lifetime the man was a fake, and could punish him. Jesus was a fake. He said he would return. He has not returned. He is a false prophet according to Deuteronomy. He was punished! That is why Jews will not accept him as their messiah.
You even make your own God into a liar by distinguishing what God said in the Jewish scripture and what he allegedly said as Christ in the Christian scripture. In one of these scriptures, God must be a liar Himself. If Jesus is not a false prophet then an omnipotent God is a liar for defining a false prophet in a way that included Jesus. If God appeared as a man claiming to be God, then God was lying when He said over and over again in Isaiah that He alone was the saviour. Why would he have been so insistent in Isaiah that He alone could save and claim to be the saviour? Obviously because dishonest and deranged men often claim to be God. All such men were not the saviour, were not God, because only God could save. Men who claimed otherwise were dangerous crooks or madmen. It is surely obvious, but not to Christians, who would rather make out that God was an idiot ignoring His own words and appeared on earth as a man, Jesus, claiming to be a messiah.
God made the ultimate sacrifice, you say, meaning presumably that he allowed Himself to be killed on the cross. But only the human form of God was killed. God was never in any such danger, was He? So how was this charade an ultimate sacrifice? If God really was the ultimate sacrifice, then He is now dead! In fact, a man died for claiming to be a king of the Jews. The Jews claimed only God was their king, so this man was claiming to be God. He was doing what God had forbidden, so could not have been God, could he? Jews rejected the claim, but Christians accepted it. You are a Christian and claim you are right, making God a liar, but claiming you tell the truth. Why should I believe you contrary to the evidence? I should not, unless I were an idiot. Christians are liars, but there are a lot of idiots around. They become a new generation of Christians.
Thanks for your offer of tuition, but, for me, adding lies to lies cannot make a truth. Keep reading the AskWhy! pages. I hope you will see sense, but I cannot imagine you will.
