Thousand Oaks Baptist Church
Jesus Is Jehovah
By David A. Tucker, Sr.
JESUS IS JEHOVAH - INTRODUCTION
Over sixteen hundred and seventy years ago, a young man by the name of Arius lived in the North African coastal city of Alexandria. Arius was one of the pastors in the local church in that city.
Arius was a well-educated pastor. He had received his religious training at Antioch, under Lucian, a respected scholar. At the first, he held to the literal, grammatical, historical interpretation of the Bible. This put him in opposition to the majority of the Alexandrian scholars, who believed in the allegorical method of Biblical interpretation.
But Arius was also a man whose logical mind and temperament demanded an entirely clear and rationalistic statement of each point of doctrine.
And it so happened in the Christian churches of that age, that the question of the relationships of the Persons within the Godhead was a constant source of agitation among the scholars. The question of the personality of the Holy Spirit had not yet become a question. And while most professing Christians believed that Jesus Christ truly is God, the question of the relationship of God the Father to God the Son had not yet been settled to the complete satisfaction of the scholars.
And Arius was not satisfied with the theories which had been proposed to explain this supposed problem of the relations within the Godhead. Arius said,
"We must either suppose (1) two divine original essences, without beginning and
independent of each other, (2) we must substitute a dyarchy for a monarchy, or (3) we
must not shrink from asserting that the Logos [the Word - Jesus Christ] had a beginning of
His existence - that there was a time when He was not."
Now, since Arius was a man who lived a pure and ascetic life, his influence in this question (at least in Alexandria) began to be felt. So much was his influence felt, in fact, that in the year 321, the bishop of Alexandria called a synod, which subsequently excommunicated Arius and drove him out of the pastorate.
This action split the Alexandrian church and sent rather large ripples of reaction throughout the churches bordering the Mediterranean Sea, and even farther. Actually, not very many Christians really held Arius' views. But two factors were in play: (1) Arius' teachings had some appeal to those who recognized the Biblical doctrine of the subordination of the Son to the Father, and (2) many felt that the bishop who had excommunicated Arius had acted intolerantly.
The views held by Arius and his followers were really fairly simple. Here's what they believed:
1. The Son of God was created out of nothing; therefore, he is different in essence from the Father; he is the Logos [the Word made flesh]; he is wisdom, and he is the Son of God, but only by God's grace, and not so in himself.
2. There was, when the Son of God was not. Hence, he is a finite being, having at least a beginning (and possibly an ending).
3. The Son of God was created before everything else, and through him the rest of the universe was created and is administered.
4. To the Arians, the human element in Jesus was his body only. They claimed he had no human soul. His soul was the Spirit of Christ, which had been created before the universe. Any human elements that appear in the Gospels in Jesus Christ, said Arius, are to be attributed to this Spirit, this Logos. [You see, the idea of making a distinction between the human and divine natures of Christ had not yet occurred to these earlier theologians, and so they simply had no answer for Arius' arguments.]
5. Arius and his followers also held that, although the incarnate Logos [or Word] is finite, and therefore not essentially God, he is still to be worshipped, being highly exalted above all other creatures, being the immediate Creator and Sustainer of the universe, and also being man's Redeemer.
6. All through this process, the Arians claimed to adhere to the Scriptures, and were willing to use any Scriptural statements - in or out of context - to define their doctrine.
The doctrines of Arius spread widely, and the churches recognized that a decision had to be made: Either Arius was right, and his teaching should be developed and set forth; or else Arius was a heretic, and some means to combat his heresy had to be found and used.
The Council of Nicea was convened in the year 325, and Arianism was all but completely defeated by the brilliant defense of a young man named Athanasius. Athanasius was both intelligent and thoroughly Biblical. He set forth before the Council, with great clarity, the truth of the Bible that in the Godhead there is both sameness of essence and distinct personalities. To the Bible-believing scholars of that age, Athanasius' exposition of this truth settled the question once and for all.
But as a political party in the early churches, the Arians died hard and slow. It wasn't until around the year 500 that Arianism finally declined and all but completely died out.
The rise of the Roman Catholic church in the next few centuries, with its unifying influence and somewhat smothering effect upon unapproved doctrines, kept Arianism virtually dead and its remains relatively untouched until here in the United States in the late 19th century.
Only after Protestantism had broken away from Rome, in all of its splintered fragments, and such a favorable time came along when men eventually felt free to examine, explore, and embrace new ideas, could Arianism again be successfully reborn and grow. And it did, nourished by three great factors: (1) the lack of zeal and the ineffective, dead indoctrination of many of the denominations, (2) the approaching 1st World War, and (3) the expectations aroused by such groups as the Seventh Day Adventists.
And sure enough, in 1872, Charles Taze Russell, of Allegheny, Pennsylvania, and a group of his followers, began studying the Bible from a viewpoint that, among other things, took the Arian view of Christ. In 1884, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania granted a charter to Russell's group, under the name, "Zion's Watch Tower Tract Society." Two years later, in 1886, the first of Russell's books was published, entitled The Divine Plan of the Ages. It was soon followed by six other volumes, under the original title, Millennial Dawn, later changed to Studies in the Scriptures. At least 15 million copies of this series have since been distributed. In 1931, the group adopted the new name, "Jehovah's Witnesses," under the very capable leadership of Joseph Franklin Rutherford.
This cult has shown what self-sacrificing zeal can do to propagate a belief. Their diligence in searching the Scriptures to find support for their prearranged system of doctrine puts to shame the often ignorant indifference of the Bible which characterizes many professing Christians. This cult has set into motion human forces and resources which God the Holy Spirit would desire to set in motion in our own churches, if we would let Him.
But with all of their zeal and study, the Jehovah's Witnesses hold dozens of erroneous, heretical, and even apostate views. These false views fall into two main varieties:
1. While they make a pretense of teaching the entire Bible and nothing but the Bible, they are absolutely silent on several central themes of the Christian faith. For example, they never mention the believer being "in Christ," and yet that phrase and phrases similar to it occur 164 times in Paul's epistles, and represent what that great Apostle found to be the unifying, empowering, life-giving, central source of his Christian life. Other strange omissions could easily be shown.
2. The second variety of error results from a one-sided emphasis on only certain passages and verses of the Bible, interpreted in what can only be called a "wooden" fashion, entirely apart from the context of the passage or the greater, underlying philosophy and movement of the entire, revealed Word of God, which we call "the analogy of faith." Portions of the Bible that were never meant to be joined have been fused by the "scholars" of this cult into a bizarre eschatological doctrine - a weird teaching on the future events of prophecy. The method that they have used can be illustrated by fusing the following three passages of Scripture:
"And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed,
and went and hanged himself." (Mat.27:5)
"Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise." (Luke 10:37)
"Then said Jesus unto him, That thou doest, do quickly." (John 13:27)
This is a fair example of the study methods used by the adherents to the doctrines and practices of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society.
But there is one basic error in all of the erroneous doctrines of the Jehovah's Witnesses, and all of this introduction has been merely to set the stage for its appearing.
The true touchstone of genuine, historical, Biblical Christianity is still today the proper response to that fundamental question posed by Jesus Christ in Matthew 22:42...
"What think ye of Christ? Whose son is he?"
Within certain limits, we can perhaps somehow tolerate various styles of dress, a least some range of tastes in music, recreation, and entertainment, the use of tobacco, and maybe (if we are very liberal) even the moderate, non-medicinal use of alcohol. We may for a time possibly overlook a few aberrant views of the church, or dispensational vagaries, or even a little bit of theistic evolution, and still be Christian, just as long as our Christology - our personal relationship to and belief in Christ - is correct and real.
But if a group's basic position toward the Person, Deity, or work of Jesus Christ is wrong, then we may not be able to even apply the name "Christian" to that system of belief. And one of the continuing aspects of the Jehovah's Witnesses, from the first to this hour, is a modern form of Arius' ancient heresy, as it relates to a wrong view of Jesus Christ.
Here's what the Jehovah's Witnesses are taught to believe concerning Jesus Christ (correct up to the time this study was begun):
1. They are taught to believe that Christ, before His earthly life, was a spirit creature - named Michael the archangel - who (they say) was the first of God's creations, and through whom God made the rest of the universe.
2. They are taught that Jesus' birth on earth was not an incarnation of God in the flesh, and that Jesus merely became a perfect man, equal to Adam before the Fall.
3. They are taught that when Jesus died, his sacrificial human nature was annihilated, and as a reward of his sacrificial obedience, God gave him a divine, spirit nature.
4. The Jehovah's Witnesses are further taught to believe that Jesus Christ was never (before, during, or after his earthly existence) co-equal with God, and that he is not eternal, for "there was when he was not." They are taught that Jesus was only a man while on earth and that his death has no more significance than that of a perfect human being.
The Jehovah's Witness makes his appeal to the inspired Word of God, and so the only real mode of argument that he is obliged to heed is the attempt to show:
1. That he neglects to take into account certain vitally important passages which bear upon the deity of Jesus Christ.
2. And that he twists the clear meaning of other passages, in forcing them to support his preconceived and (essentially) Unitarian views.
And so in this study, the Lord willing, I intend to discuss six vital points:
1. First, I wish to discuss the arguments from the overall philosophy of the Scriptures which relate to the Trinitarian concept.
2. Second, I wish to explore the doctrine of the subordination of the Son to the Father, which shows Christ's Deity.
3. Third, I wish to examine the New Testament passages proving the Deity of Jesus Christ.
4. Fourth, I wish to make a comparison of the Old Testament and New Testament passages demanding that Jesus Christ is Jehovah.
5. Fifth, I wish to show that Jesus Christ both claimed and exercised the prerogatives and attributes ascribed only to Deity.
6. And last, I wish to probe passages which have been mistranslated by our modern Arians in their Bible, and have been twisted from their clear meanings (especially when these clear meanings set forth the absolute Deity of Jesus Christ).
My friend, if any or all of your sympathies have been with the Jehovah's Witnesses, I invite you to transfer your sympathies to Jesus Christ right now. And for just these few minutes, as you read the pages of this study, please open up your heart of hearts to a message you may have never heard before: That Jesus loves you, and that He died in your place, on a cross, on a hill called Calvary, He rose literally and bodily from the grave, and that by simply believing that, you can have your sins forgiven right now, in that moment of simple faith.