Jesus  Spoke With Both Scientific And Divine Authority

Jesus  Spoke With Both Scientific And Divine Authority

 

In this essay I am going to try to convince you that Jesus used His language in the same way that professional linguists and scientists do. As a result, the New Testament turns out to be MUCH more clear than any of our denominations treat it – and treat HIM! I then, in subsequent postings provide examples of two highly disputable teachings, showing how conceptually clear and experientially profound they become WHEN you understand them in the grammatically natural and literal way that you already read ANY serious fact-based literature.

 

Regarding Jesus, God has revealed that it is “BY Him” and “THROUGH Him” that the universe was created:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was with God in the beginning. All things were created through him, and apart from him not one thing was created that has been created” (John 1:1-3).

“He was in the world, and the world was created through him, and yet the world did not recognize him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him” (John 1:10-11).]

“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.  For everything was created BY him, in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities — all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and by him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:15-17)

“He said to them, ‘Why are you afraid, you of little faith?’ Then he got up and rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a great calm. The men were amazed and asked, “What kind of man is this? Even the winds and the sea obey him!” (Matthew 8:26-27).

“To me, the very least of all saints, was this grace given, to preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to enlighten all as to the program of the secret that from the beginning of the ages has been hidden by the God who created all things through Jesus Christ;” (Ephesians 3:8-9)

 

As our Creator scientist and engineer: it was JESUS who had to calculate and create the following:

[Google Ai: “ What are the specific elements in the “fine tuning” of the universe?”] 

Ai response:

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In cosmology and physics, the “fine-tuning” of the universe refers to the observation that several fundamental constants and initial conditions must fall within an incredibly narrow range for the universe to support complex structures, stars, and life.”

These specific elements are typically categorized into three groups:

1. Fundamental Physical Constants

These are the “numbers” built into the laws of physics that determine the strength of forces and the properties of matter. [1, 2, 3, 4]

• Strong Nuclear Force: This force holds atomic nuclei together. If it were 2% stronger, hydrogen would fuse into diprotons too quickly, and stars would burn out in a flash. If it were 5% weaker, deuterium would not form, preventing stars from ever igniting.
• Electromagnetic Force: This governs how atoms and molecules interact. A slight change would prevent stable chemical bonds or cause protons in the nucleus to repel each other too violently for large atoms to form.
• Gravitational Constant (\(G\)): Gravity is exceptionally weak compared to other forces (by a factor of \(10^{40}\)). If it were slightly stronger, stars would be smaller and burn out too fast for life to evolve; if slightly weaker, stars and planets could never condense from gas clouds.
• Weak Nuclear Force: Controls radioactive decay and neutrino interactions. If it were much stronger or weaker, the process of forming life-essential elements in stars (nucleosynthesis) would be disrupted. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]

2. Cosmological Parameters and Initial Conditions

These elements describe the state of the universe at its birth during the Big Bang. [1, 2]

• Cosmological Constant (\(\Lambda \)): This represents the energy density of empty space. It is “tuned” to roughly 1 part in \(10^{120}\). If it were slightly larger, the universe would have expanded too rapidly for galaxies to form; if slightly smaller, it would have collapsed back on itself almost immediately.
• Expansion Rate and Density: The balance between the initial expansion speed and the mass density of the universe must be precise to about 1 part in \(10^{55}\). A slight deviation would result in either a “Big Crunch” or a universe too sparse for stars to form.
• Initial Entropy: According to Sir Roger Penrose, the low-entropy state of the early universe required a precision of 1 part in \(10^{10^{123}}\), a number so large it exceeds the number of atoms in the observable universe. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

3. “Brute Facts” of Particle Physics

These are the fixed properties of the building blocks of matter.

• Mass of the Electron: If the electron were just 2.5 times heavier, it would combine with protons to form neutrons, leaving the universe with no atoms—only a sea of neutrons.
• Proton-to-Electron Mass Ratio: This ratio is critical for the stability of DNA and other complex molecules.
• Neutron-to-Proton Mass Difference: The neutron is roughly 0.14% heavier than the proton. If this difference were slightly smaller, protons would decay into neutrons,

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We do not need to be able to understand all of those details before becoming deeply impressed at what the One who took the name “Jesus” was able to calculate and then engineer into existence. Have you ever meditated on the importance of the following: JESUS was and still is the Supreme Scientist who was able to technically calculate and engineer with amazingly complex and specific calculations, all that is described by the Artificial Intelligence (Ai) answer above. HE is the one who calculated that “Proton-to-Electron Mass Ratio” mentioned above! HE is also the one who calculated things like the specific size of planet Earth so that it would create a gravity conducive to plant and animal life; and who designed the technical details underlying the symbiotic relationships of any paired animals and plants so as to enable both to survive; and who calculated how large the moon needed to be and how far away from Earth it needed to be, in order to create tides that would be beneficial rather than destructively large; and how large and how distant to create and position  a sun whose heat energy would be beneficial rather than destructive. EVERY amazing thing that you can discover about nature was conceived, calculated, and created by HIM as the source of our creation! In short, imagine all of the discoveries that all of the human scientists have already made and have yet to be discovered: they are all seeking to understand what the great Son of God already had calculated within His gigantically powerful mind! I am not using any “poetic hyperbole” in what I have written above: it HAD to be literally true about the one “who created ALL things”!

 

If this connection between Jesus the Messiah and Jesus the Scientific Genius is new to you, I hope that you can sense His majesty, authority and competency growing greater in your mind!

 

And as the Creator of our first human parents, He also created our ability to  think and communicate with WORDS! He even invented the first universal language, plus all of the subsequent languages after the dispersion away from the Tower of Babel! In our minds that ought to cause Him to be regarded as the most competent communicator the world has ever seen, no?

And what are the qualities of an excellent communicator? –

1. When speaking, you make sure to know who your audience is going to be, so that you can speak in a way that will be understandable to the full range of people who will be there.
2. Do not use terminology that is available only to the sophisticated linguists in your audience.
3. However, speak accurately enough so that the most technically educated in the audience will find it to be fully accurate. Imagine if Albert Einstein were asked to give a lecture to a high school physics class: his content would be toned down to their level, and yet any fellow physicists in attendance would find all that he said to be completely accurate.
4. Pick the best words or images that can be used to most accurately or powerfully express what you want to say. Know the difference between terms “IS” versus “is LIKE,” so that they know when you may be speaking literally or in parables or riddles.
5. A good communicator forms His “literal” sentences – e.g., commands and promises – so that the sentence means some serious version of what the words being used SEEM to be saying, when taken in the grammatically natural and literal sense – the same way that we already read serious any history books or newspapers.

 

If Jesus is indeed that supreme Communicator, then He is to be received as one when we are reading what either He or the apostles who were filled by His own Spirit have caused to be written. If what is written in the New Testament is truly the product of HIS Spirit, then we should be loath to try to make it say something other than what actually is written! Just as I would be paralyzed at the thought of trying to correct some formula that Doctor Einstein had written down in his high school physics lecture, so I would assume that what Jesus or His apostles say comes with the same intelligence and accuracy that was available when He was designing the solar system and our own semi-infinitely complex human bodies!

 

For example, when we read of Jesus saying something like,  “Your father Abraham was overjoyed to see my day …I tell you the solemn truth, before Abraham came into existence, I AM” (John 8:56-58), you can “supplement” it’s implication by imagining Him also rightfully saying something like: “I invented the very air that you are breathing and your lungs which breathe it, as well as the ability to use the words you just used; so take what I just said SERIOUSLY!”

As a matter of fact, that is the way that you and I are to react to EVERYTHING we read in the New Testament, no matter how proficient we think we are in those original Biblical languages! It is important that we let that sink in, especially the next time you are tempted to change what He actually said into what your denomination or tradition have convinced themselves  to imagine what He “surely must have meant”! Jesus was not some “hippie poet” who spontaneously threw out compulsive utterances that we can feel free to reinterpret in a way that is in harmony with what we already find acceptable! He who was able to design an entire universe and all human languages, was going to be able to do the same for including within His New Covenant writings all that must be believed and practiced for the understanding, the structure and the nurture of His ecclesiastical body that He described as “MY church” (Matthew 16:18). And we are to no more think of ignoring or altering what He described and brought into being than we should think of “improving” His design of our human bodies by merging the DNA of a human with that of a fly (as in that 1958 Vincent Price movie, “The Fly”)!

 

Whether creating or speaking as a Scientist or as the Messiah, Jesus knew what He was saying with the same linguistic mastery He used in CREATING human languages! Consequently, any of our man-made alterations will always damage or destroy  what He had designed and described! And yet In my over six decades of carefully investigating our various contemporary versions of “Christianity” I have yet to find a single one that is not explicitly or implicitly guilty of numerous versions of explaining away or reinterpreting doctrines, promises, and commands of His that are quite understandable as expressed, but which are found “too radical,” or “too Catholic,” or “too Protestant,” or “too Pentecostal” or “too unimaginable to be taken literally.” For example, “Surely Jesus never expected us to take it literally when He said, ‘I tell you truly, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; nothing will be impossible for you.” We think or even explicitly say things like that, even though we probably already know by now that His “truly”/ “verily”/ “assuredly” (Greek: “αμεν”/”amen”) was regularly used by the Greeks at the beginning of a statement in order to create “a ‘verbal underlining’ to signal that the following statement is of pivotal importance and absolute certainty” (From Google Ai).

 

So let us look at several teachings of Jesus, our brilliantly profound scientist and communicator that few want to believe in that “grammatically natural and literal” sense in which He taught. The first will deal with that Pentecostal Promise He will fulfill for ALL who are willing to become His true disciples. The second will deal with what He causes to happen within the Lord’s Supper for those who have “eyes to see” and “ears to hear.”

Example 1: The Difference Between His Spirit’s being “With” And “In” us.

“If you love Me, keep My commandments. And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever– the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you know Him, for He dwells WITH you and will be IN you” (John 14:15-17).

 

THE “120”:

 “When the Day of Pentecost had fully come, they were all with one accord in one place.  And suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. Then there appeared to them divided tongues, as of fire, and one sat upon each of them. And they were all FILLED with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance” (Acts 2:1-4). [Jesus had said that that Spirit HAD been “WITH” them; but AFTER their experienced “filling,” He was now “IN” them, in their spirit and soul AND body!]

 

THE SAMARITANS:

“Then Philip went down to ¹ the city of Samaria and preached Christ to them. And the multitudes with one accord heeded the things spoken by Philip, hearing and seeing the miracles which he did. For unclean spirits, crying with a loud voice, came out of many who were possessed; and many who were paralyzed and lame were healed. And there was great joy in that city. … But when they believed Philip as he preached the things concerning the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, both men and women were baptized. …  Now when the apostles who were at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent Peter and John to them, who, when they had come down, prayed for them that they MIGHT receive the Holy Spirit. For as yet He had fallen upon none of them. They had ONLY been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. Then they laid hands on them, and they ‘received’ the Holy Spirit” (Acts 8:5…17)

[When did these Samaritan disciples experience the “receiving” of His Spirit INTO them? When they believed in Jesus? When they were immersed? NO! The only way that you can claim that we all experientially receive God’s Spirit the moment we “believe in Jesus” (according to whatever form of “belief” satisfies US) is to pretend that delayed event never happened to these Samaritan baptized disciples!]

 

PAUL:

“As he journeyed he came near Damascus, and suddenly a light shone around him from heaven. Then he fell to the ground, and heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?’ And he said, ‘Who are You, Lord?’ Then the Lord said, ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. It is hard for you to kick against the goads.’ So he, trembling and astonished, said, ‘Lord, what do You want me to do?’ Then the Lord said to him, ‘Arise and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.’   …  Now there was a certain disciple at Damascus named Ananias; and to him the Lord said in a vision, ‘Ananias.’ And he said, ‘Here I am, Lord.’ … And Ananias went his way and entered the house; and laying his hands on him he said, ‘Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on the road as you came, has sent me that you may receive your sight AND be FILLED with the Holy Spirit.’ Immediately there fell from his eyes something like scales, and he received his sight at once; and he arose and was baptized” (Acts 9:3 … 18).

[This is “circumstantial” evidence, but Paul must have believed in the divine authority of Jesus because He had now acknowledged Jesus as his “Lord”. But we are logically required to assume that he was at that time “filled” with God’s Spirit since Jesus Himself had sent Ananias to accomplish that very same Pentecostal event, but we are not informed anything about when He “fell” upon him in chronological relation to his baptism, only that at some time he “spoke in tongues more than all of you” (1 Corinthians 14:18).]

 

CORNELIUS & HOUSEHOLD:

“… ‘To Him all the prophets witness that, through His name, whoever believes in Him will receive remission of sins.’ While Peter was still speaking these words, the Holy Spirit fell upon all those who heard the word. And those of the circumcision who believed were astonished, as many as came with Peter, because the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out on the Gentiles also. For they heard them speak with tongues and magnify God. Then Peter answered, ‘Can anyone forbid water, that these should not be baptized who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?’ And he commanded them to be baptized in the name of the Lord.” (Acts 10:43-48).

[“When did Cornelius experience that ‘receiving’ of God’s Spirit?” – which is merely another way of saying when did Cornelius ACTUALL receive God’s Spirit coming INTO him? In THIS case it does obviously seem to have occurred when they inwardly “believed” enough of what Peter had preached (in the view of the Spirit), even before having a chance to openly confess Christ as “Lord and Savior” OR be baptized OR receiving apostolic hands. God’s Spirit chose to sovereignly “fall” apart from ANY “norm” or denominational protocol. And that way of receiving His Spirit will be wonderfully “valid” anytime God’s SPIRIT wants to do it that way! But, once again, God’s Spirit had not come INTO them until this additional Pentecostal event. ]

 

THE EPHESIAN “DISCIPLES”:

“And it happened, while Apollos was at Corinth, that Paul, having passed through the upper regions, came to Ephesus. And finding some disciples he said to them, ‘DID you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?’ So they said to him, ‘We have not so much as heard whether there is a Holy Spirit.’ And he said to them, ‘Into what then were you baptized?’ So they said, ‘Into John’s baptism.’ Then Paul said, ‘John indeed baptized with a baptism of repentance, saying to the people that they should believe on Him who would come after him, that is, on Christ Jesus.’ When they heard this they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. And when Paul had laid hands on them, the Holy Spirit came upon them, and they spoke with tongues and prophesied. Now the men were about twelve in all” (Acts 19:1-6).

[Consider that question, “DID you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?” If Paul believed that we always experience the receiving of His Spirit when we “believe” then he simply COULD not have asked that question, since He clearly accepted that they had indeed believed! Paul’s question makes it a certainty that we do NOT always receive His Spirit when we believe, even though Cornelius and his household DID receive His Spirit then! Once again: no formula seems to fit the Biblical pattern, does it‽

 

Therefore the question about the Biblical, authentic version of receiving His Spirit must be able to satisfy ALL of those occasions mentioned above, when we know that they DID receive Him; is that not both logical and obviously true? So let’s summarize those descriptions:

 

The 120 previously knew all about Christ’s promise and command for them to wait in order to receive His Spirit, both from what He had taught them in John, and in Acts 1. He told them to wait, but not how long they would wait; so they waited in obedience and expectation and then experienced “receiving” His “falling” on the very day of the Pentecostal “first fruits” festival (described in Exodus 23:18), making that outpouring an obvious “antitype” of the “type” represented by that festival (as in the baptismal parallel described in 1 Peter 3:21).  

 

The Samaritan disciples were evangelized, believed, and baptized in as godly a manner as can be imagined, yet despite all of that even they did NOT experience receiving Him INTO them until apostolic hands were laid upon them some days or weeks after that believers’ baptism.

 

Paul MAY well have believed in Jesus as His Lord, when confronted by Jesus. And we may confidently assume that he did receive God’s Spirit when Ananias was sent by Jesus Himself for that very purpose!  So Paul did “believe” and “confess” and was “baptized” at the time of personally receiving God’s Spirit, after Ananias had laid his hands upon him.

 

Cornelius, as we have seen, is the only one that the normal Evangelical Protestant assumptions can happily agree with, since the Spirit came IN them when they apparently “believed” in Jesus, even before having a chance to confess Christ as “Lord and Savior” OR be baptized OR receiving apostolic hands. The Spirit of God had been WITH them by previously drawing them toward Him and sending an Angel to them, but He did not come INTO them until their own Pentecostal event! And how did the other believers know that the Spirit had come into them? “All the Jewish believers who came with Peter were amazed, because the gift of the Holy Spirit had also been poured out on the Gentiles. FOR they were hearing them speaking with tongues and exalting God” (Acts 10:45-46).

 

The Ephesians, like the Samaritan disciples, provide clear evidence that it is very possible to be a true “disciple” and to have “believed” in a way that Paul believed was valid, and yet to have NOT yet have received God’s Pentecostal Spirit! How can a logical person that is surrendered to such OBVIOUS inspired evidence not accept that as evidence provided by God Himself‽

CONCLUSION:

1. There is NO “formula” to define when the Pentecostal promise has been received, whether back then or in our day. The significant differences described between His “falling” and other events such as “believing” and “baptism” ought to make that obvious to any fair-minded reader of the Book of Acts.
2. The apostolic “norm” was to lay hands and pray for Him to do His “falling” or “filling” and ought to be our normal way of ministering. They never had to receive that laying on of hands more than once, and perhaps that will hold true for us as well when we are deepened by Him in the way He had done so to them!
3. All who received His Spirit were what both Jesus and His apostles accepted as true “disciples.” For them, a disciple was a person who had either already consecrated themselves to fulfill all that Jesus had commanded in the Gospels to be obeyed literally, OR (seemingly in the case of Cornelius) whom the Spirit had decided WOULD consecrate themselves. It involved more than accepting that you were a sinner and that you were accepting Jesus as “Lord and Savior” in some ill-defined way that seems SO common in our many cheapened versions of Christianity coming from pulpits and airwaves!
4. The “Receiving” or “filling” or “falling” of His Spirit was clearly an experienced EVENT, an event that you obviously could not help remembering for the rest of your life, much like you would remember getting your first job, getting married, or hit by lightning (and surviving!). From the Biblical examples, even the human body gets to participate and record what He causes to happen. The language that was used was explicitly experiential language: “filling,” “falling,” and “receive power.” In addition, the “tongues,” “prophecy,” and praise that burst out from the recipients clearly indicate some kind of God-create experienced “invasion,” to which even the body would participate in various degrees in sensing what was going on! And those first “tongues” were almost certainly an unexpected surprise: Jesus had only told them to expect “power,” but did not mention any such “tongues” in Acts 1 (they would not likely think of them from His Mark 16:17 promise).
5. Even the earliest churches had their baptisms structured with Christ’s “Pentecostal Promise” in mind. As soon as you came up out of the water, the Presbyters (elders) would lay hands on you and pray for you to receive His “Holy Spirit.” Given how much more serious they were back then to create disciples who had been taught serious commitment to each of Jesus’s specific commands, and therefore would have done deeper wrestling before surrendering to His authority to rule over them, it is much more likely that they actually did experience His “falling” at that first “imposition of hands” than is the norm nowadays! The Eastern and Western churches that have evolved from them still claim that when their “bishop” lays hands upon them their still do “receive” His Holy Spirit. But it would be a rare event if one of those recipients actually reported experiencing anything! That is especially true of the Eastern Orthodox churches who “chrismate” (“confirm”) their tiny infants!
6. After His resurrection, they had been powerfully impacted by a God-created event of the ultimate consequences to them. The one they loved, obeyed and even worshipped had conquered death and had proven it to them! Yet they were still the same people with the same instincts: “Then, the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were ⁵ assembled, for fear of the Jews” (John 20:19). But that was the last use of that term in Acts! After their Pentecost there was a new divine presence INSIDE of them (“with you” versus “IN you”; “Christ IN you”); there was a marked difference in their boldness and the power of their ministry. And even their first ministerial converts in Acts 2:43-46 joyously plunged into dramatically different lifestyles!
7. YOUR DECISION: Only you can and must make the decision about whether you have experienced His Pentecostal Promise. Even though I was a committed Christian, prepared to surrender all of my obedience to Jesus and each of His specific commands and even though I was an ordained clergyman and was ministering to others, after much prayer-filled examination of what Jesus had described about the promised future effects of His Spirit’s upon them, I finally became confident about several things:
   1. Jesus had made it clear that there was a difference between God’s Spirit being “WITH you” and being “IN you” – “ but you know Him, for He dwells WITH you and will be IN you.” That meant that they could be aware of, and experience His presence in their lives, but that after their Pentecost He would become somehow a PART of them from within!
   2. ALL of His commands AND promised Spiritual gifts were intended to exist for all future ages. And that included that experienced Pentecostal Promise. And therefore all who were hungry for Him in our day had the right and the responsibility to receive His Spirit in the same kind of ways described within the Book of Acts.
   3. His promises are supposed to be embraced and specifically ASKED for: “So if you, despite being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit TO THOSE WHO ASK HIM?” (Luke 11:13, necessarily referring to His mention in John’s “IN you”).
   4. And I personally had NOT yet received His Holy Spirit! So I began urging people at prayer meetings to lay their hands upon me so that I might receive His Spirit. For me, it took about three months of earnestly seeking Him, while He revealed things that I needed to change, deepen and repent of in my relationship with Him, His Son, and with my deeply resented step-father. And at a wonderful retreat in December of that year (1972) He obviously thought that my life-hardened soil was spiritually “plowed” deeply enough for Him to bear fruit, when some prayer partners laid their hands upon me He DID fill all of me – spirit and soul and even body – with His Spirit. And ever since then my heart has been made significantly more tender, but I now can experience His SPIRIT praising the Father when I am praising Him, even including that “language of angels” Paul called those “tongues”(1 Corinthians 13:1), and even some other of His gifts – just as has been promised to ALL of us who are willing to become like the “little children” that He exhorted us to be!

 

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF HIS “BAPTISM IN THE HOLY SPIRIT” IN OUR WAY OF SALVATION

“Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you. Now if anyone does not ‘have’ the Spirit of Christ, this person does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is your life because of righteousness. Moreover if the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you, the one who raised Christ from the dead will also make your mortal bodies alive through his Spirit who lives in you” (Romans 8:8-11).

 

In His resurrection they had been powerfully impacted by a God-created event of the ultimate magnitude: the one they loved, obeyed and even worshipped had conquered death. Yet they were still the same people with the same instincts: “Then, the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled, for fear of the Jews.” But that is the last use of that term in Acts, because after their Pentecost there was a new divine presence INSIDE of them – “with you” had changed to “IN you” and even Paul’s “CHRIST in you!” (Colossians 1:27).

 

In the apostolic writings this Pentecostal event was not some “extra-curricular” event that supposedly ENRICHES Christ’s version of the Christian life. Rather it is His culminating event in the sequence of steps by which Jesus CREATES HIS version of the Christian life! One of the logical examples of that famous obvious but ignored “elephant in the living room” is that according to the Spirit-inspired literature of the New Testament, one cannot be “IN the Holy Spirit” until one has experientially “RECEIVING” His Holy Spirit in the same way that they had! Statements like, “the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Romans 14:17), were referring to what Paul himself had experienced in his PENTECOSTAL receiving of God’s Spirit – there WAS no other kind of “Kingdom of God” Christianity back then!

 

The examples described within the Book of Acts are the description of how God achieved the goal of drawing people into His “Kingdom of God Christianity” in the days of the apostles. And if that is how He accomplished His goal back then, why should we dare to assume that He would want would change what He did back then any more than we should dare to assume that we can be acceptable as His “disciples” is some other way than is described within His apostolic writings? Those five different versions of experientially receiving or being filled by His Pentecostal Spirit – described in Acts 2, 8, 9,10, and 19 – are an essential step in how humans who surrendered to Jesus BECAME apostolic Christians! Since those early centuries there have been individuals within churches who have been drawn by God into His Pentecostal promise, but the vast majority of Christian churches do not teach or minister that wonderful promise! And unfortunately, the few who claim to do so still seem to think that you can ignore much of His highly demanding Sermon on the Mount and still produce “Spirit-filled disciples”! (I am referring to the history of the changes in the Assembly of God denomination)

 

In other words, until we have entered His Pentecostal Promise (Acts 1:4-5), the very BEST that can be described for us is that we might be in the same condition that those original 120 disciples were in in Acts 1, while they were waiting for Jesus to make it possible to send into them the same Holy Spirit that He had received at His baptism – He had promised, “Nevertheless I tell you the truth. It is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you; but if I depart, I will send Him to you” (John 16:7). Acts 2 describes how those who had been prepared by Jesus Himself would receive His Spirit, The subsequent descriptions in the Book of Acts describe how us later “normal” Christians similarly received His Spirit and then were under “the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship” (Acts 2:42). All of the New Testament Christians were “PENTECOSTAL” Christians – although substantially different from later “Pentecostals,” for those original ones whose received Spirit, led them to obey His “Sermon on the Mount” in the same literal way that He and His Spirit-led apostles modelled it for them!

 

The realization that you may never have been taught how to experientially enter into the fulfillment of His Pentecostal promise may be humbling, but you will be able to survive the humiliation in the same way that I had to do, to your eventual WONDERFUL delight!

  

 

Example 2: “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you.”

“‘Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in Me has everlasting life. I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and are dead. This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread that I shall give is My flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world.’ The Jews therefore quarreled among themselves, saying, ‘How can this Man give us His flesh to eat?’ Then Jesus said to them, Most assuredly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have 0 Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For My flesh is food indeed, and My blood is drink indeed. He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him. As the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father, so he who feeds on Me will live because of Me. This is the bread which came down from heaven–not as your fathers ate the manna, and are dead. He who eats this bread will live forever.’ … When Jesus knew in Himself that His disciples complained about this, He said to them, ‘Does this offend you? What then if you should see the Son of Man ascend where He was before? It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life. But there are some of you who do not believe. For Jesus knew from the beginning who they were who did not believe, and who would betray Him. And He said, Therefore I have said to you that no one can come to Me unless it has been granted to him by My Father’”

“From that time many of His disciples went back and walked with Him no more. Then Jesus said to the twelve, ‘Do you also want to go away?’ But Simon Peter answered Him, ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. Also we have come to believe and know that You are the Christ, the Son of the living God’” (Matthew 5:47…69).

 

Jesus knew the effect that His outrageous statement was going to have, and WHO would be so offended that they would renounce being His disciples!  And He also clearly tied those outrageous words to what it meant to “not believe” in Him.

Typical Protestant “interpretation” – “It only was an exaggerated way of talking about the need to have an intensely intimate and person relationship with Him.”

But He already knew how to say things like that in language that they COULD understand: “He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me” (Matthew 10:37).
““If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him” (John 14:23).

And if all that he meant was to describe some “relationship” (in the normal sense of that word) why would he risk losing that relationship by NOT explaining what “He really MUST have meant” when “many” of His disciples began to abandon Him. If that WAS all that He meant, they almost certainly would not have left! And do not forget the significance of that “Most verily”: “it was regularly used by the Greeks at the beginning of a statement in order to create “a ‘verbal underlining’ to signal that the following statement is of pivotal importance and absolute certainty”! That is not the way you introduce a statement that meant something other than what it SEEMS to be saying!

It seems clear that even those who did NOT leave him still did not understand what He was talking about – and He did not explain it even to them! BUT, when He was interpreting that Passover supper with its new and deeper meaning, there is no way that the meaning and significance of that puzzling and very disturbing event did not “slap them in the face” as they listen to Him say:

“And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to the disciples and said, ‘Take, eat; THIS is My body.’ Then He took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink from it, all of you. For THIS is My blood of the  new covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins” (Matthew 26:26-28).

That earlier scandalous event about, “unless you eat the flesh of the body of Christ…” was the only recorded event where Jesus lost – actually drove away – “many” of His disciples, and disturbed and saddened those who did not leave!  His “MOST verily” introduction back then made it certain that they would take what He said most seriously and would remember the statement: it would be natural for them to think, “Jesus is very serious indeed about some kind of real eating and drinking.” Psychologically, therefore, it seems impossible for me to believe that when Jesus surprised them at that “Last Supper” with His “This IS my body … blood” they could NOT have been “slapped in the face” with the obvious connection between these two incredibly disturbing statements! “So THAT’S what He meant back then!!!”

 

At age 21, over 60 years ago, I was first introduced to the idea of the “real presence” of Jesus in the Holy Communion by means of Him being in some kind of real union with the Eucharistic bread and wine. God used a godly Episcopalian priest to help me experientially experience that wonderful truth. But at first I was very actively engaged in intellectual debates with him, before being able to finally “see” Jesus there in front of me and be able to receive Him into me somehow, His spirit into my spirit, His soul into my soul, and even His body into my body. At age 84, I still do not know how He makes it possible – but I don’t need to know “how” in order to experience that “how.”

 

Jesus gave us a number of definitions to inform us what He wanted to accomplish within us experientially, rather than satisfy our intellectual curiosity. Do any of your know HOW our Creator was able to unite to a fully human person? Or about HOW to intellectually comprehend the “anatomical” connection between His glorified humanity and some bread and wine. I just surrendered to the words that He and Paul chose to use, without needing to know just how He accomplishes that union. 

But because I finally accepted those words that He chose to use, rather than turning them into some “poetic exaggeration” in the way that I used to do, I was able to enter into the mysterious reality that  He had in mind when uttering them! And my life has never been the same!

And, just in case you have been brainwashed into associating those literal words with some kind of gross cannibalism, you can consider why He did not have that Last Supper until the very last day He was able to be with them. He was establishing this eating and drinking as the link to connect His presence and His union with them AFTER He would be leaving them. “This is my body… blood” that He was talking about was not the same reality that existed at THAT time, consisting of muscular tissue and blood cells. Paul reminds us (in 1 Corinthians 15:35-49) of the transformation of that physical humanity into its currently glorified and “spiritualized” state:

 “So also is the resurrection of the dead. The body is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body. And so it is written, ‘The first man Adam became a living being. The last Adam became a life-giving spirit” (verses 42-45).

If you and I are going to be raised into “spiritual” bodies, will that make us less real than we are now? Of course not! Jesus is just as real now as He was back then. And even my physical body – which is part of “me” – is involved in having Him become part of “me” and me becoming united to Him. The more intimately you desire to be with Him, and the more excited you are about knowing from the INSIDE the meaning of  Paul’s “Christ IN you, the hope of glory!” – the more that you yearn for Him, the more wonderful that Eucharistic promise becomes! Rather than argue about the WORDS of the promise, EXPERIENCE those words of the promise!!!

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These are just TWO of the wonderful experiential mysteries that are available to those who believe that Jesus and His holy apostles really meant what they really said when understanding them to be God-inspired master communicators! And there are dozens and dozens of passages that we need to embrace as if they were as real and as specific as the laws that govern this universe, because they DO come from the same divine AUTHOR.

 

And if you think that you love and are personally loyal to Him you best show it by getting as passionate as He was in His prayer for our unity in John 17:20-26!

“I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word; that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me. And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one: I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me. Father, I desire that they also whom You gave Me may be with Me where I am, that they may behold My glory which You have given Me; for You loved Me before the foundation of the world. O righteous Father! The world has not known You, but I have known You; and these have known that You sent Me. And I have declared to them Your name, and will declare it that the LOVE with which You loved Me may be in them, and _I_ in them.”

“Christ IN you, the hope of glory!”

“This IS my body which is given for you”

“MOST assuredly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you.”

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Reed Merino, M.Div.

ReedMerino.com

“Blueprint for a Revolution: Building Upon ALL of the New Testament”