In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. (John 1:1-3)
The Apostle John penned the opening lines of his Gospel in response to the false teachers and heretical teachings that had already sprung up in the first century A.D. The groups he was exposing had “designed” a “Jesus” that was far more to their liking than the true Jesus – a “Jesus” that supported their particular beliefs. One group was the Ebionites, who rejected the biblical teaching on the nature of God by their denial of the preexistence and deity of the Son of God. Their position naturally negated the triune nature of the Godhead:
Ebionites (or Ebioneans) denied Jesus’ divinity and believed that Jesus was the Son of God only by virtue of His being “adopted” by God;1“What is Ebionism?“
Another heresy was called Docetism, which denied the physical incarnation of the Son of God, opting to design their Jesus as a phantasm or non-physical ghostlike apparition. This denial of the physical incarnation also eliminated the possibility that their Jesus possessed a human nature. Not being physical, of course, their “Jesus” would not have been nailed to a cross, would not have died, and would not have been physically resurrected:
An early Christian heresy associated with *Gnosticism, docetism [sic] denied the material nature of Christ and thus his true humanity. The term is derived from the Greek word dokeo, which means “to seem,” or “to appear,” and thus a docetic view would be that Christ only appeared to be human.2N.P. Feldmeth. “Gnosticism,” Pocket Dictionary of Church History: Over 300 Terms Clearly and Concisely Defined; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, Academic, 2008, p. 53
The first eighteen verses of John’s gospel are a head-on refutation of these two ancient heresies and they touch on several essential doctrines of the faith. The Gospel of John is often referred to as the gospel of belief. The word “believe” or “belief” occurs approximately 98 times in John’s gospel, but more importantly, he defines for the reader exactly what Jesus they are to believe in. The Jesus of Scripture is the preexistent Son of God, Who is fully God and physically incarnated in the very human person of Jesus. The true Jesus was physically crucified, died, and He raised His physical body to defeat death itself.
The Apostle John began his apologetic by establishing that Jesus existed prior to all creation and He is the One that created all things. He begins by pointing back to the book of origins, Genesis, and showing that Jesus was right there with the Father.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. (John 1:1-2)
Whenever the beginning was, the Word, the pre-incarnate Christ, already existed! To make certain the reader understood the meaning of his words, John defines what that means: The Word existed with God, was “with” God face-to-face (“with” here is the English translation of the Greek word pros which means one as always turned toward one); and the Apostle unashamedly stated as fact that the Word was and is Himself God! John added to his case with the next verse:
All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. (John 1:3)
The Apostle John doesn’t leave the slightest wiggle room on this. The whole of creation was brought into existence by Jesus, the Word. Therefore, creation was not the work of a different, inferior creator. It is this Jesus, the eternal Son of God, who created all things, who gives the right to become children of God to those who believe:
But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. (John 1:12-13)
John then addresses the teaching of both the Docetists and Ebionites:
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John [the Baptist] bore witness about him, and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.’”) (John 1:14-15)
As we have pointed out, the Apostle John was refuting the false teachers (Ebionites and Docetists) who had created their own Jesus, far different and inferior to the real Jesus of history. Long before John penned these words, the Apostle Paul had written to the Corinthian church:
For if someone comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or if you accept a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it readily enough. (2 Corinthians 11:4)
Few Christians today realize the apostles were already dealing with groups inventing new and far inferior versions of Christ in the First Century.
We are still dealing with groups teaching a false Jesus today, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, along with many other pseudo-Christian groups. Though they talk about “Jesus,” their “Jesus” is a person of their own design rather than the Jesus of history and Scripture. Most cults of Christianity — those cults that claim to be Christian — tend to err in much the same area as did the false teachers of old, the intersection of the humanity and the deity of our Lord. He was and still is fully God and fully human! The Apostle Paul put it this way,
For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily (Colossians 2:9)
Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, claim to believe in Jesus, but in their teaching, Jesus is a human replacement for Michael the Archangel. In the beginning, according to JW doctrine, Jehovah created Michael — who in turn created everything else under Jehovah’s direction. Later, Jehovah eliminated Michael and created a human replacement for Michael in the womb of Mary. That human replacement for Michael was Jesus. Although nothing of Michael’s true essence survived this process, Jehovah implanted a copy of Michael’s memories into the newly minted Jesus, who lived about 33 years, was crucified, and died. According to the Watchtower, the man Jesus is “dead forever dead,” with nothing of his essence to live ever again. This teaching created a problem, though. With Jesus out of existence entirely, Who ascended into heaven in Acts 1 that the Apostles thought was Jesus, physically resurrected? Ah, to fix this “problem,” they decided Jehovah created yet another Michael to replace Jesus and implanted the “memories” of Michael 1.0 and the now-defunct human Jesus into Michael 2.0. Confused? (For a more detailed explanation, see “In the Beginning was Michael.”) The Watchtower itself seems often confused on the issue and shows up with how often it refers to their very own Michael 2.0 as Jesus. They find they are forced to use the name Jesus for the new Michael 2.0 in their publications because long after Jesus was supposedly replaced by Michael 2.0, the Bible has the apostles and believers referring to Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, as if He still existed! The Watchtower does not bother to explain away this identity crisis switcharoo, because they cannot possibly explain it, and their own people are taught to question nothing they are taught. And there are severe consequences if they DO question, as explained below.
Why would the Watchtower organization go to such ridiculous lengths to hide the true identity of Jesus? Simple, like the Ebionites before them, they are determined not to recognize Jesus as God even though John plainly says that He is. That gives them the ability to reject the doctrine of the Trinity, which they detest. They confuse people with how and why questions. How can God be a Trinity? Why would God exist as three persons? How could God die, as Jesus plainly did on the cross? Jesus obviously prayed to the Father — why would God pray to Himself? And so on. So, according to their thinking, Jesus must have been a mere human, now out of existence, because they cannot simply accept what the Bible plainly teaches. So, when faced with the Bible’s truth that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine, they opt for humanity and “deep six” the deity part. To accommodate their theology, the Watchtower felt the need to design another Jesus and, along with that, another gospel, one in which the death of their “Jesus” enables the vast majority of lower-class JWs — the great crowd — to earn their own salvation by going door to door, etc., and by giving their complete obedience and deference to the elite upper-class JWs — the “anointed.”
Your attitude toward the wheatlike anointed “brothers” of Christ and the treatment you accord them will be the determining factor as to whether you go into “everlasting cutting off” or receive “everlasting life.” (Matt 25:34-46) Prove yourself to be a loyal companion of the anointed “wheat” class, the “faithful and discreet slave,” whom Christ has appointed to provide spiritual “food at the proper time.”3The WATCHTOWER — August 1, 1981
A different gospel, wouldn’t you say?
The Mormons opted for a different sort of Jesus. In their version, He wasn’t eternally God or even eternally exist but was born as a spirit being on a planet near the star base Kolob (wherever that is!) to a god and one of this god’s many Mormon wives. The Mormon “Jesus” came to earth and was born into a human body. He then went on to earn godhood — like his father before him and his father before that … you get the idea. The good news (gospel) of the Mormons is we, too, can become gods and goddesses like all the gods and goddesses before us. The male gods each marry many goddess wives, keep them eternally pregnant, giving birth to a new spirit baby every nine months to populate their own planets. Just in case you missed it, you might note that this is a different Jesus and a different gospel from the Jesus and gospel we learn about in the Bible. And in our opinion, it does not present a terribly bright future for the “goddesses.” Our friend and former Mormon, Agusta Harting, would sometimes say she was worried about the kind of planet her late husband Dan would build for them since he could not seem to hang a picture straight.
Sadly, Evangelicals are not immune to the temptation to create a new and exciting “designer Jesus” either. Another Jesus and another Christ are currently being spread through hundreds of thousands of evangelical churches. This designer Jesus is the “Jesus” and the “Christ” of the Enneagram. Richard Rohr, who trained the leading lights of the Enneagram movement, Suzanne Stabile, Ian Cron and Christopher Heuertz, teaches that Jesus and the Christ are separate entities! In Rohr’s design, the entire creation is “the Christ,” and Jesus, by virtue of his being part of creation, is “Christed,” and so are we:
Christ is the eternal amalgam of matter and spirit as one. They hold and reveal one another. Wherever the human and the divine coexist, we have the Christ. Wherever the material and the spiritual coincide, we have the Christ. That includes the material world, the natural world, the animal world (including humans), and moves all the way to the elemental world …4Richard Rohr. “This Is My Body” Center for Action and Contemplation website; Mon., March 4, 2019
The Apostle John was rightly concerned about those who were being deceived in the first century by the teachings concerning another Jesus. Paul was likewise very concerned as he wrote to the Corinthian church about the believers who were being subtly deceived into embracing another Jesus:
But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ. (2 Corinthians 11:3)
We share the same concern today, nearly 2,000 years later. As our friend and former Jehovah’s Witness, the late Lorri MacGregor, often said, “If you have the right Jesus, you are right for eternity. If you have the wrong Jesus, you are wrong for eternity.”
Hold fast to the true Jesus and the true gospel. There is nothing more essential.Ω
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Don & Joy, thank you for your ministry.
I have had this question for sometime, and now I have the place to ask from the above.
Why do Evangelicals, etc. still display, globally, lpublicly, and privately the Italian, man-made paintings of Christ?
Thank you.
Sadly, they don’t know any better.