Heart of Light Fellowship Church – Ogembo, Kenya

Many of our readers are aware that a little over two years ago, we began teaching at a church in Kenya. The opportunity surprised us. It started with a message from a pastor with a simple request on our MCOI Facebook page: “Can you teach my people the Bible?” Like many ministries and churches, we receive multiple requests from individuals in various nations, asking us to send money. We have no resources to verify whether the person asking us to fund their orphanage, make them an extension of our ministry, or make some other request is legitimate, and we are a fairly underfunded mission ourselves. This request was different. It was more a request for time, attention, and teaching. As I interacted with the young pastor, Pastor Danson, I learned that his father had founded the church, and he had passed away. The church leadership fell to Pastor Danson, and he did not feel equipped. We began meeting online on Saturdays 2-3 times a month. That was about 2 years ago. As we progressed, we discovered they only had one Bible in a church of 70. With the help of our supporters, we provided Bibles in their language. Our time of teaching and mentoring was helpful, but they needed more in-depth, concentrated access to sound biblical training. We connected Pastor Danson and the church to a Bible Training website, which was started and is run by Dr. Bill Mounce. The Bible Training site has courses, taught by solid scholars like Darrell Bock, the late Dr. Ronald Nash, and others.  The non-certification courses are lay-friendly and free, largely because Dr. Mounce designed this to help churches just like this one in Kenya. The elders in Pastor Danson’s church are taking the courses, and a small group study is using the material. But in the process, many in the church are beginning to raise questions about things their church leadership likely assumed they already understood. After all, they believed in Jesus and that He is their savior. The pastor emailed us a list of their questions on Monday morning. Some of their questions are:

1. Is Jesus God? Why should I believe that Jesus is God?
2. Did Jesus say He is God?
3. Who is the God son?
4. What did Jesus say about his position in relation to God?
5. Many people view the cross as a symbol of Christianity. Should we use it in worship?
6. Is belief in Jesus enough for salvation?
7. What actions can we take to overcome the separation mentioned in Isaiah 59:2?

These are seven out of the first nineteen. Many will look at this and wonder, “Why don’t they know? This is basic stuff.” And, so it is, but the church in Kenya is suffering the same malady that many churches in the West also suffer. It is the malady of “Assumption.” It is mistakenly assumed that those attending any particular church fully understand what it means to believe that Jesus is God. It is an easy assumption to make, when said doctrines are frequently touched on, that everyone hearing the words can, to some degree, explain these teachings to someone else. However, just hearing the name of an important doctrine, spoken from the pulpit or in a class, does not at all mean it is fully understood, or that the hearer could explain it to a third party.  Church leadership probably assumes the congregation knows and are likely able to articulate the concept to someone who needs to understand it. We discovered this decades ago when I (Don) was speaking at a church in Florida. Joy was sitting near the back, and a church elder and his wife were in the row in front of her. I was speaking on the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ teaching that Jesus is a created being and not God. As I began to teach the biblical view, the elder looked at his wife and said, “Jesus never claimed to be God.” On another occasion, Joy was talking with a friend from our home church at the time who had grown up in that church. She was interested in why we would reach out to JWs, and as Joy explained some of their beliefs, she asked, “How can they believe such silly stuff?” Rather than attempt to answer directly, Joy asked a question. “Do you believe Jesus is God?” She said she did, of course, and Joy asked, “Why do you believe it – and could you defend and show why you believe thatto others if the need arose?” Though a strong Christian believer, she found she couldn’t adequately respond.

About thirty years ago, I (Don) was asked to handle Dr. Norman Geisler’s book table at an event where he was speaking. The new book on his table was The Battle for the Resurrection, written in response to a professor’s teaching of a non-physical resurrection at a very popular evangelical seminary. As I was at the table, quite a few of the pastors who came by looked at the book and asked, “How do we know the resurrection was physical?” My snarky reply was, “Have you read the Bible?” I don’t think it was so much that these men doubted He was raised; they just didn’t understand why that fact was so important. Jesus was raised physically –rather than in some sort of non-physical, non-tangible body. Christians, IF Jesus was not raised physically, He is still in that grave, and there is no hope for any of us. How do we, as a church, address these issues?

I (Joy) was raised from a baby in church, Sunday School, Vacation Bible school and ALL the rest. Of course, I knew of the Trinity and the deity of Christ and could certainly explain and/or defend it! Right? Not really, in an adequate fashion. When I met some JW women on a Women’s bowling league and wanted to share the gospel with them (I did know JWs were lost spiritually, and I truly cared for these women), I checked out their “Bible teachings” on the resurrection, Deity of Christ, salvation, and much more for myself, privately, compared with my own Christian beliefs. I realized that although I was very familiar with the terms, I really had only a passable layman’s knowledge of the Trinity, etc… I had never learned to defend my faith from the Bible, whereas JWs are specifically learning how to seemingly deny mine. They did not properly understand much at all of Christian doctrine, of course, but they were taught – week in and week out – in a special class dedicated to that purpose – to competently twist the scriptures to deny not only the Trinity, but all essential doctrines of Christian faith. I do not think I am alone in coming to this realization. I indeed had work to do.

So, how can Christians and Churches learn to more competently answer non-Christian assaults on our faith, so that we may perhaps explain the gospel, which hinges on believing in the right Jesus, His death, burial, and physical resurrection, to these people whom God deeply loves, to release them from cultic bondage? First, be a “Questionable Church.” By that, we simply mean to invite and encourage questions. Barna has noted that, statistically, many people who leave the church do so because their questions went unanswered.  Second, when we teach in churches, it is helpful to take every opportunity to stop and explain what something means, and why it is important in demonstrating a point, particularly a theological one. For example, did Jesus ever claim to be God? The answer is yes, but many think that Jesus never made the explicit statement that would be rendered in the English translation, “I am God.” Sometimes translators do the reader a disservice by adding a word that is not in the original text. They often do it for “sentence flow” from the original Greek to English, which can be helpful for readability, but sometimes doing so changes the meaning of the text. For example, most translations render Jesus’ statement to the Jewish leaders in John 8:24:

I told you that you would die in your sins, for unless you believe that I am he you will die in your sins.

In the original Greek text, the word “he” is not there as in “I am he.” Jesus is telling His audience something they have to believe about Him to be redeemed from their sins, and that something is I AM, YHWH. The words are ἐγώ (ego) for “I” and εἰμι (eimi) for “AM” and reads:

I told you that you would die in your sins, for unless you believe that I AM you will die in your sins.¹A Greek-English Interlinear is helpful on this one. After the word εἰμι (eimi) for “AM” the word “he” is put in box brackets [he] to denote it isn’t in the original but added by the translator

The theme of Jesus being fully God and fully man begins with the Apostle John’s thesis in the first fourteen verses of John chapter one. He is writing to expose the false teachings of the Ebionites of his day, who denied the pre-existence and hence deity of the Son, and the Docetists, who denied the physicality of the incarnation of the Son. In his gospel, John tells the story of who Jesus was, is, and continues to be, and he carefully chose parts of Jesus’ life and teachings that supported his initial thesis. Jesus is God, and He asserted He is God. He said, “I AM,” applying the covenant name of God to Himself.

We see this demonstrated again in John chapter 10 in a confrontation with the Jewish leaders who demanded to know who He was, and after giving a fairly lengthy response, He said in John 10:30:

I and the Father are one.

John records the response of the Jewish leaders, which demonstrates that they understood exactly what He claimed, that He is God:

The Jews picked up stones again to stone him. Jesus answered them, “I have shown you many good works from the Father; for which of them are you going to stone me?” The Jews answered him, “It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you but for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself God.” (John 10:31-33)

Jesus didn’t say something like, “Oh wait, you misunderstand. I never intended you to think I was claiming to be God.” Instead He doubled down and responded:

Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I said, you are gods’? If he called them gods to whom the word of God came—and Scripture cannot be broken— do you say of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’? If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me; but if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.” (John 10:34-38)

His response to them wasn’t a denial of their understanding of His claim, but rather that if those to whom the word of God came, (the unjust judges in Psalm 82:6 who will die like men) were told “I said, “You are gods,” how much more the One Who truly is God can identify as Himself as The “Son of God” (John 10:37) and performs the works that demonstrate He is God. (John 10:34-38) We again see that they completely understood He was claiming to be God and:

 Again they sought to arrest him, but he escaped from their hands. (John 10:39)

Arrest Him for what? What would have been their charge? Blasphemy! To the Jewish leaders it is the height of blasphemy to equate the Father and the Son and yet, He did that here and in John 5:23 when He told them that the Father and Son will be honored in the same way.

When John closes his book, he tells the reader that all of this is meant to show them which Jesus to believe in for salvation. It is not the Jesus of the Ebionites, who they claimed didn’t exist prior to this birth and was then adopted by God to be the Son after His birth. It isn’t the Jesus of the Docetists, who denied His physical incarnation and therefore His physical death and physical resurrection. No, the Jesus John had been building his case for us to believe in for salvation is the Savior (Messiah), and Son of God, Who is fully God and fully human.

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. (John 20:30-31)

Amen and amen…Ω

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