How can any Christian understand what Paul was saying when they don’t even know the questions posed to him? Was he talking to Jews or non-Jews? How can they interpret his words correctly if they haven’t even studied Torah like Paul or Christ did? When Christ says something kabbalistic (or anything else) how do Christians know how to interpret it when they don’t even know Kabbalah? They just make up their own interpretations from what I have seen.
You gotta study Torah from the Hebrew to understand what they were saying.
When did Christianity come into existence exactly? How do you define one? Because they believe that a rabbi can be God? No man can be God and God cannot be man. If any one tells you that it’s a plain out lie. Plenty of false messiahs come around from time to time claiming to be God. In the end times the false messiah that will be propelled to the world stage at the end of days will claim he is God. That’s a no-no to do such according to God Himself.
Just because you overcome death with the help of God does not make you God. Just because you have the Spirit of God on your shoulders does not make you God. Messiah does not equal God. Ask Moses. He was the first Messiah and he never, ever claimed to be God. Some Jews wanted to deify him while he was alive but they knew the rules. Even some Jews today within Chasidism who believe that Rebbe Schneerson was the Messiah, who passed away in 1994, believed that he should be accredited with being God. Ain’t happening.
You simply cannot put God in a box. He is infinite, omniscient, omnipresent, indivisible, so on and so forth. He is Spirit as defined by Judaism and defined by your New Testament in John 4:24. It doesn’t define Him as man or anything physical. But once you go down the path of saying one man can be God it opens the door to anyone claiming they can be God or a god, too. Just ask the Mormons.
He is so close because He is Spirit. This gives Him the chance to have a neshamah-to-neshamah (spirit-to-spirit) relationship with any and all here on Earth. That’s closer than anything physical that can happen. When I say, “be real” does that mean be more physical? No! Of course not. It means be truthful with me. Truth is not physical. It never has been and never will be. God is the truth.
Torah is the original Good News. Study it and you’ll understand why. Nothing can replace it and nothing can substitute for it - not even the New Testament.
There is only one God, one Torah, one people to lead the rest of humanity back to the truth. And no man can be savior of the world. Only God can be that because He has said so.
If and when the Messiah shows up ask him if he is God. The real Messiah will say no.
The concept of Christ’s deity is the most difficult for many Jews to accept. The idea of a man being God is foreign to the Jewish mind, as history is full of men who would be gods. Only, in this case, it is God Who became a man. It seems unthinkable that the Sovereign Ruler of the universe would be willing to stoop so low.
David marveled that God, Who is infinite, would even take note of man.
Psalm 8:4
What is man that You are mindful of him,
And the son of man that You visit him?
But this is the distance God’s mercy was willing to traverse. Again, David expresses this amazing aspect of God’s character.
Psalm 103:11
For as the heavens are high above the earth,
So great is His mercy toward those who fear Him;
Because His mercy is this great, it was necessary for Him to stoop this great distance.
God is aware and concerned for things great and small in the universe He made. He made a covenant regarding Israel of which He said would cease to be a nation if one could count the grains of sand on the sea shore or number the hosts of Heaven. If a man (or the Devil) could count these, God could verify the number to be right or wrong because He knows the number. Not only does He know the number, but He has given each host a unique name.
Psalm 147:4
He counts the number of the stars;
He calls them all by name.
And though He has ordained this vast universe, He does not ignore the small things.
Psalm 84:3
Even the sparrow has found a home,
And the swallow a nest for herself,
Where she may lay her young—
Even Your altars, O Lord of hosts,
My King and my God.
Consider the Shema.
Deuteronomy 6:4
Hear Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord is one!
The title and name of God is said three times. This speaks of three aspects of God’s being in one unity. “One” here, is unity from a multiplicity of parts. This is the same unity of a husband and wife, the parts of the tabernacle, and the two sticks in Ezekiel 37 that represent fragmented Israel being restored to one nation. It means we must worship God in His totality, i.e. all of Who He truly is, not just the aspects the we want to worship. Otherwise we are making God into an idol in our hearts.
“Our God” is Eloheinu, being derived from Elohim, the plural form of Elohah. Elohim, plural, is also used in creation.
Genesis 1:26
Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
Who is this “Us” and “Our” that the scriptures identify as the Creator? These terms advise that the parts or aspects of our One God are distinct Persons. It is not that we worship gods, but that our One God is comprised of three Persons. Therefore He can converse with Himself and say “let Us” do so and so. Remember that God alone is Creator.
Nehemiah 9:6
You alone are the Lord;
You have made heaven,
The heaven of heavens, with all their host,
The earth and everything on it,
The seas and all that is in them,
And You preserve them all.
The host of heaven worships You.
So the “Us” in Genesis 1 can not be God plus some other separate entity or being. “Us” must refer to God alone.
In considering God being One, and that we must worship no other gods but all of the true God (and not just the parts we fashion in our minds as the god we prefer or like), observe how the different persons of God are characterized.
One aspect of God is that He is Spirit, as you mentioned already. Physical eyes do not see spiritual things. So, there is an aspect of God that CANNOT be seen.
Genesis 1:2
And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
Numbers 11:25
Then the Lord came down in the cloud, and spoke to him, and took of the Spirit that was upon him, and placed the same upon the seventy elders; and it happened, when the Spirit rested upon them, that they prophesied, although they never did so again.
Job 33:4
The Spirit of God has made me,
And the breath of the Almighty gives me life.
Deuteronomy 4:12
And the Lord spoke to you out of the midst of the fire. You heard the sound of the words, but saw no form; you only heard a voice.
There is an aspect of God that if a man sees, he will die.
Exodus 33:20
But He said, “You cannot see My face; for no man shall see Me, and live.”
And there is an aspect of God that can be seen by a man without being fatal.
Exodus 33:11a
So the Lord spoke to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend.
Genesis 18:1-2
Then the Lord appeared to him by the terebinth trees of Mamre, as he was sitting in the tent door in the heat of the day. So he lifted his eyes and looked, and behold, three men were standing by him; and when he saw them, he ran from the tent door to meet them, and bowed himself to the ground
Here, the Lord appeared to Abraham as a man along with two other men that were angels. (These are the two angels that went into Sodom and entered Lot’s house.) Not only did Abraham see God as a man, but this “man” ate the food that Abraham gave to Him.
Genesis 32:24 and 30
Then Jacob was left alone; and a Man wrestled with him until the breaking of day... So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: “For I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.”
Again, God appeared in the form of a man. A similar thing happened in Judges 13. Sampson’s parents were visited by a “man” which was actually God. His identity was hidden but then later revealed when they offered a sacrifice to God. Then they were afraid of dying because they realized Who had appeared to them.
So, God is one, a unity of multiple parts, aspects or persons. We see three distinct persons of God in relation to human sight. Further, we see that God can take on the form of a man. So it is not impossible for God to reveal and manifest Himself in the form of a man. This is what He did when He came as Emmanuel (God with us).
God has progressively revealed Himself to mankind. He was identified first as our Creator. Then He identified Himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Then He called Himself “I am”. Now, in this last dispensation of time, God has revealed Himself as “Father” through sending His Son. The Son is the express, exact, perfect image of the Father. No one has seen the Father, except the Son. But the Father is revealed in the Son. God made man in His image and after His likeness, but this image was marred by sin. This image is restored in God’s Son, Jesus Christ. The visible person of God in the Hebrew scriptures was the pre-incarnate Son of God, called Jesus in the New Testament.