PING
Positively love listening to John MacArthur!...study with him daily on Grace To You...just finished up the Gospel of John and now working on the Book of Acts...I also listen to J. Vernon McGee at times and David Jeremiah, but my favorite is MacArthur...thanks for posting this.
Jesus specifically said he was God: “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). That should just about settle it.
Thank you!
In John chapter 1, later in the chapter, when Philip found Nathaniel, he said to Nathaniel that “I have met Christ.” And this is how he referred to it. He said, “We have found Him of whom Moses in the Law and also the prophets wrote. Come and see.” The Lord Jesus is not only the theme of the New Testament, but He is the theme of the Old Testament. We had a glimpse of that, a profound glimpse of it, in Isaiah 53, and on Sunday nights we’re going to take a look at Christ in the Old Testament coming up and seeing some of those revelations concerning Him.
So, according to Revelation 19:10, Jesus is the theme of prophecy. That is He is the theme of Old Testament prophecy and clearly the theme of New Testament preaching. That is why the apostle Paul said, “We preach Christ, Christ only, Christ alone, and Christ crucified.”
Jesus told the disciples that the entire OT was about HIM ...not Mary ... HIM
I don’t subscribe to Christianity, but I am a big proponent of
John 4:24
“God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.”
That’s what Jews have been telling the world for the past 3,000+ years. He is incorporeal, indivisible, infinite and eternal, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient with no shape or form. The only thing that can unite humanity is Spirit which in One and a perfect Unity.
The biggest lie that the Adversary tells mankind is that he can be God or a god and worshiping any man is considered idolatry.
Supporting statements from the Torah (aka The Five Books of Moses from the Old Testament) is
Numbers 23:19
“God is not a man, so he does not lie. He is not human, so he does not change his mind. Has he ever spoken and failed to act? Has he ever promised and not carried it through?”
Deuteronomy 4:15
“You saw no form of any kind the day the LORD spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire. Therefore watch yourselves very carefully,”
that is to say, you cannot conceive of Him as having any form because He is neither a body nor a bodily force.
Let’s consult the Judge and prophet, Samuel.
1 Samuel 15:29
“He who is the Glory of Israel does not lie or change his mind; for he is not a human being, that he should change his mind.”
How about the prophet Hosea?
Hosea 11:9
“I will not carry out my fierce anger, nor will I devastate Ephraim again. For I am God, and not a man— the Holy One among you. I will not come against their cities.”
And for the oldest story in the Tanach (aka the Bible)
Job 9:32
“For he is not a man, as I am, that I might answer him, that we should come to trial together.”
And for the followers of the Christian’s rabbi
Psalm 146:2-3
While I live will I praise HaShem: I will sing praises unto my G-d while I have any being.
Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.
Only to the extent that you give Christ credit for having the power He claims, can you believe in it and can you accept it.
That said, over two decades of reflection on MacArthur leads me to the inexorable and well reasoned conclusion that he often lets a “god of anxiety” into his theology. That militates directly against faith. I would not want to believe in that kind of “God of MacArthur” any more than I would want to believe in, say, the “God of the LDS.”
It is a vice, dating from our preincarnate rebellion against God in unity with Adam and Eve, to overly intellectualize things and take pride in our mental pictures. And that is a gobstopping God-stopper for our souls.