We have centered Christian Chronicles around many themes over the years. It has been an unexpected pleasure to write and produce this little paper each month, and God has taken it from the newsletter of a small church and made it into a worldwide ministry. It strikes me as odd that we have not heretofore produced an issue like this month’s.

For the October issue, we have asked each of our contributing authors to submit an article that presents some significant aspect of the Person and/or work of our Lord. Oz Mark, for example, submitted an article entitled, “Behold the Branch!” It presents the four offices of the Jewish Messiah. Oz, a converted Jew, gives us a perspective that we otherwise would not have. Gene Yancey writes about the uniqueness of Christ as the God-Man. Hugh Sherrill provides valuable information concerning what other religions have to say about the second Person of the Trinity. I wrote a somewhat mystical article discussing the role of the Word of God in creation.

There are those who claim that the sermon on the mount has nothing to do with Church Age saints; that it is written concerning the saints of the Kingdom Age, and has no application to today. My, that seems a convenient way to overlook its teachings, and to feel no obligation to seek to personify or embody the virtues espoused therein. And how awful the loss of blessing that is suffered in the hearts of those who do not understand the spiritual riches of blessings in the promises He is making even unto us as we walk today, in the vanity of our flesh. No, there is none of us today who can honestly say that we are very much like “the blessed” of Mt 5: 3-12. We don’t really feel like the light of the world, do we? The fact is, we’re not very much like the blessed, because they are, oh, pure of heart. And it surely stirs the soul more to stir up a good strife than it does to stop an argument and make peace.

We Christians think of the things yet to come in terms of what we shall see and experience, and the thinking on these things comes to be about us, and not about the Object of our faith and the Fount of our blessing. Our desire for the rapture is subjective, not objective. While our enrichment and glory shall indeed be lavish in that Day, it shall be but the merest glimmer of a reflection of Christ’s own glory. Prophecy is about Christ; and yet, the promise of glory is ours also.

It is right that we should anticipate with hopeful hearts those things that God has promised us, but our Christian hearts ought to swell to imagine the great glory of our Groom as it rises majestically over the City of Jerusalem as He ascends the steps of the Temple to take His throne.

We do not take these goings on in the world, perhaps, quite seriously enough. Civilizations move slowly; very, very slowly, but very, very surely. The prophets declare that what we find in the heart of the world for everything holy, we see on the front pages of our newspapers every day. We see it in the world’s malevolent heart toward His people, Israel, and in the heart of the intelligentsia toward Christ’s very bride as well. And finally, toward Christ Himself.

We look at the state of things on a daily basis, and we measure in our hearts whether this or that has some specific prophetic implication. We focus closely on the politics of that region, those of us who follow it, and the nearer we see the region moving toward peace—a false peace, but not overt war—the higher our hopes jump; and when the “road map” becomes a “road block,” we witness a tiny deflation of our hope.

It is natural, but it is not right. It is autonomic, like breathing, or like the beating of our hearts, but it is incorrect. We believe that we understand the times and the seasons by what we see around us, but we need not become so focused on the details that we lose sight of the big picture. The Revelation of’ Jesus Christ is about the unveiling of His eternal glory, the revelation of the terrible brightness of it before man. It is about His ascent of the throne in the Kingdom Age, and it is about His glory as He resides at the pinnacle of New Jerusalem, shedding the light of His immortal grace and glory over all of that great city, and then upon all the earth.

The world bandies about the name of God’s Holy City as if it were their own. It sits in unrighteous judgment of God’s people, and it turns an oily smile on Israel as it prepares to wrest that real estate from the hand of God Himself, and give it to those whom He shall judge most severely.

The world ignores the things altogether that the Bible says about that land, as if it had no bearing on their decisions. The attitude is, “Yeah, but…” It does not realize that it is tweaking the toe of God Himself, and He will shortly crush them as they stand upon their feet in rebellion against Him. Not only does the world not want to know about things prophetic, it actively wants not to know. Why? Because it is marching proudly down the Avenue of Destruction toward an end it will not foresee.

All sides are angry and disputing, and a tremendous blood-letting lies just beneath the surface of their civility. It erupts occasionally in the person of a suicide bomber, or in a missile that flies unseen by those whom it destroys. The state of the Middle East is this: There will be an accommodation to necessity, but there will be no peace. There will be no peace until the Prince of Peace wrests the kingdom of this world from the devil and turns it into the Kingdom of God. Even so, come Lord Jesus!

Of course, Paul did not mean that he was the savior of anyone. He knew that it was Jesus who died and paid the penalty for the sins of the entire world. What he was saying is that he would become like those to whom he would bring the Word of God, so that they would not refuse to hear him. Today, it is an unpopular tenet of our faith, this liberty that we have in Christ. If I avoided every sin that I could think of, I would still be as nasty a sinner as the worst person who ever lived. Separateness is not a matter of not visiting sinners in their own surroundings. Rather, it is a state of mind in which one’s whole being is dedicated to service to God. Holiness is being separate to such a degree that nothing “gets on you” of the world. It is spiritual. If we had to “clean up our acts” before we could bear fruit, then our fruit would be the result of our righteousness. Jesus is the Vine. It is the very essence of God that flows from the vine into the branches and bears fruit. Fruitfulness is not a measure of righteousness, but of separation to God from the world and its silly notions and traditions. It is never all right to sin, but it is far worse to attempt to appeal to others through self-righteousness. No sooner do we lose sight of our continuing sinfulness than we become wholly unfruitful. Paul thought he was chief of sinners; he was wrong. I am. You are. Christ is righteous, and it is Him who produces the fruit we bear.

Isaiah was a man of the government, concerned with the throne of Israel. He focuses prophecy regarding Israel’s future King, the Messiah. During the Day of the Lord, the Messiah will reign on David’s throne, and He shall be viewed in His beauty and glory by the entire world. God refers to this King as His Branch. This fulfills the promise made to Abraham that through Him all nations would be blessed.

Here the future King of Israel is identified as a descendent of Jesse, the father of King David. A peasant would be the ancestor of the King of the world! Aaron’s rod budded, showing his to be the lineage of the priesthood. The laid-low line of David would also extend its dynasty to its ultimate Heir, the Son of David, namely Jesus. He is the Branch of the root of Jesse. This fulfills the promise made to David that he would have a Son to rule forever.

Please note that the theme of Matthew’s Gospel is, “Jesus the King.”

Jeremiah agrees with Isaiah in that this Branch would be King, but also that He will be the Lord Himself!

And again, the same prophecy is reiterated, the only difference being that Jerusalem will be known by the name of her King:

These three prophets are in agreement: the Branch is the Lord, the King, the Priest and the Servant. The Branch is The Son of Man, the Son of God and the Son of David. He will remove iniquity in the earth, secure the safety of Israel and He will rule.

This final Branch revelation summarizes all that He is and does: He is the Man to behold. He shall build the temple as God’s Servant. He shall bear God’s glory. He shall be a Priest. He shall be a King on His throne. He shall minister peace as the God-Man, Priest-King.

Here all four Gospels are represented. The Branch is Matthew’s King, Mark’s Servant Man, Luke’s Priest, and John’s Son of God. The Branch is the fulfillment of the promises made to Abraham and David. He is the King of the Jews and the Savior of the world!

How beautifully does God harmonize, over many decades, through several authors, a poetic picture describing His master plan of all the ages!

Behold the Branch!

As the Lord Jesus Christ walked this earth, His greatest adversary was religion. We believe today that it is still His greatest adversary. So let us investigate exactly who some of the different religions (cults) say Jesus is.

Mormonism (Latter-Day Saints) say “Jesus is a separate god from the Father (Elohim). He was created as a spirit child by the Father and Mother in Heaven, and is the “elder brother” of all men and spirit beings. His body was created through sexual union between Elohim and Mary. Jesus was married. His death on the cross does not provide full atonement for all sin, but does provide everyone with resurrection.”

Jehovah’s Witnesses say, “Jesus is not God. Before he lived on earth, he was Michael, the archangel. Jehovah made the universe through him. On earth he was a man who lived a perfect life. After dying on a stake (not a cross), he was resurrected as a spirit, his body was destroyed. Jesus is not coming again; he “returned” invisibly in 1914, in spirit. Very soon, he and the angels will destroy all non-Jehovah’s Witnesses.”

Unification Church say, “Jesus was a perfect man, not God. He is the son of Zechariah, not born of a virgin. His mission was to unite the Jews behind him, find a perfect bride, and begin a perfect family. The mission failed. Jesus did not resurrect physically. The second coming of Christ is fulfilled in Sun Myung Moon, who is superior to Jesus and will finish Jesus’ mission.”

Christian Science says, “Jesus was not the Christ, but a man who displayed the Christ idea. (“Christ” means perfection, not a person.) Jesus was not God, and God can never become man or flesh. He did not suffer and could not suffer for sins. He did not die on the cross. He was not resurrected physically. He will not literally come back.”

Unity School of Christianity says, “Jesus was a man and not the Christ. Instead, he was a man who had “Christ Consciousness.” “Christ” is a state of perfection in every person. Jesus had lived many times before and was in search of his own salvation. Jesus did not die as a sacrifice for anyone’s sins. Jesus did not rise physically and will never return to earth in physical form.

Scientology says: “Jesus is rarely mentioned in Scientology. Jesus was not the Creator, and not an “operating thetan” (in control of supernatural powers, cleared from mental defects). Jesus did not die for sins.”

New Age says: “Jesus is not the one true God. He is not a savior, but a spiritual model, and guru, and is not an “ascended master.” He was a New Ager who tapped into divine power in the same way that anyone can. Many believe he was sent east to India or Tibet and learned mystical truths. He did not rise physically, but “rose” into a higher spiritual realm.”

Judaism says: “Jesus is seen neither as an extremist false messiah or a good but martyred Jewish rabbi (teacher). Many Jews do not consider Jesus at all. Jews (except Messianic Jews and Hebrew Christians) do not believe he was the Messiah, Son of God, or that he rose from the dead. Orthodox Jews believe the Messiah will restore the Jewish kingdom and eventually rule the earth.”

Islam says: “Jesus is one of up to 124,000 prophets sent by God to various cultures. Abraham, Moses, and Muhammad are others. Jesus was born of a virgin, but is not the Son of God. He was sinless, but not divine or God Himself. He was not crucified (he ascended to heaven without dying). He is referred to as messiah and ayatollah (ayat allah, sign of God). Jesus will return in the future to live and die.”

Hinduism says: “Jesus Christ is a teacher, a guru, or an avatar (an incarnation of Vishnu). He is a son of God as are others. His death does not atone for sins and he did not rise from the dead.”

Buddhism says: “Jesus Christ is not part of this belief. Buddhists in the West generally view Jesus as an enlightened man.”

The question that I now pose is, Who does the Bible, the infallible Word of God, say that Jesus is? John 1:1-5 says: “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 nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.” John 1:14 says that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His Glory, the Glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”

The Bible teaches that “Jesus is God, the second Person of the Trinity. As God the Son, He has always existed and was never created. He is fully God and fully man (the two natures joined, not mixed). As the second Person of the Trinity, He is coequal with God the Father and the Holy Spirit in becoming man. He was begotten through the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary. Jesus is the only way to the Father, salvation, and eternal life. He died on a cross according to God’s plan, as full sacrifice and payment for our sins. He rose from the dead on the third day, spiritually and physically immortal. For the next 40 days, He was seen by more than 500 eyewitnesses. His wounds were touched and He ate meals. He physically ascended to Heaven. Jesus will come again visibly and physically at the end of the tribulation to establish God’s kingdom and judge the world.

Until one comes to believe, without a doubt, that Jesus is the Son of God and that He (Jesus) is, by His sacrificial death on the cross, man’s only means of salvation he is not saved. Mankind will not, cannot be saved from a tormenting hell until he knows who Jesus, the Son of the Living God, really is.

(Some information from Rose Publishing copyright 1994.)

What these verses tell us is that God spoke the universe into being. That was His “method” of creation; not evolution, but voice. He spoke and it was done. The breath of His mouth brought all of time and creation into being. When God spoke, the whole of time issued from His mouth. “It was done,” David said. It is interesting to note also that the psalmist did not say, “By the words of the Lord…” He wrote, “By the Word…” Singular, not plural. Our triune God is one, not many.

Let us travel, if you will, back through time, to an eternity in which the glory of God shone everywhere. But we cannot travel that far, can we? Our poor minds cannot wrap themselves around eternity. We cannot conceive what heaven must be like. We are caught up in that which was created, and cannot fathom what an uncreated heaven must be; or where it can be; or the scope or size of it. But there was God, in His mysterious Trinity. No word had ever before been spoken. But when He would speak, then everything that ever was or will be came into being.

Scofield writes concerning the Word of God in John 1:1,

The knowledge of our God is infinite. There is nothing that He does not know or that He cannot think. In His vast mind resided the Word of God, and in the creation, He spoke that Word, and the Word that He spoke was “Jesus.” Before a word is spoken, it does not have any physical manifestation. Yet, it is real. We can think it in our minds, and it is real, even though it has no embodiment. But when we speak that word, then our breath moves the air, and the air presses its tiny vibrations upon our ear drums, and our nerves send that vibrating signal to our brains, which recognize the vibrations as a particular sound, which we interpret to be words.

There, in the profound silence of eternity, David teaches, dwelt our God. He was not lonely, for He had Himself. His Spirit was life, and in His mind was the Word. Oh, Christian! How little we think of that Word! How very small we make it when our conception of it is limited to a Man, or to a Book. All of the cumulative knowledge of God was, is, wrapped up in that Word, and when God spoke, His entire Word found expression. All of time was created in an instant. Science cannot get past the notion of the passing of time. Time does not pass. We pass through it. All that ever was is, and all that ever will be always was since it was created. He spoke and it was done. He commanded and it stood fast.

What happened when God spoke was everything. Time had a beginning, and it will have its end, but all of time is constant with God, who dwells in eternity, outside of time. When He spoke, He set in motion a process, the process that we know as time; a process which would eventually bring forth the physical expression of the Word, the God-Man, Jesus Christ. Once God spoke, it was completely inevitable that Christ would find physical expression; even more surely than when we speak, the air moves. As we see it, it is a process in which one thing follows another, and still another follows that, from the beginning of creation until it is destroyed after the Millennial Kingdom. But God spoke and it was done. It was (is) not a process, but an event. Even today is Jonah in the belly of the whale, and even today is he preaching in Nineveh. He spoke and it was done. It is even now standing fast. When God said, “Jesus!” He was instantly expressed in the flesh, and is today also in that same flesh, as He was before He was “born.” Did He not appear in the fiery furnace with the Hebrew youths?

Time is a bubble in eternity, if you will. If you were inside a bubble, you could travel from one end of it to the other, and you would have no comprehension of the whole. But outside the bubble, ah, there would you see the whole. But the analogy is not valid, because outside the bubble you would be able to see someone passing, in consecutive steps, from one end of it to the other. But when God spoke time into existence, it was done. It stood fast.

Being the Word of God, well, Jesus wasn’t born missing a leg or an eye. He was completely the Word of God. There is nothing that the Father knows that Jesus, in His Deity, does not know as well. The same is true of the Holy Spirit. Each of the three Persons of the Trinity must know everything. And because they all know everything, there is no conflict between them. Each, aware of every possibility, must arrive at the very same conclusions about everything, for they all begin their deliberations with the same base of knowledge. Just because we cannot today see all of the inter-connectedness of that infinite tapestry that we call the Word of God, it does not necessarily follow that it is not the complete thought of God. How puny are the efforts of those who claim to have “the code.” How arrogantly silly they must appear to God.

Theological academia frowns upon such mysticism as this article presents. Perhaps they are right. Or perhaps they are arrogant. Whatever the case eventually turns out to be, it is probably more dangerous not to perceive our Bibles to be the complete thought of God than to diminish them on the basis that we cannot grasp all of it or seek it all out. Frankly, we ought not want a God who is no smarter than we are. In many homes, Bibles are places to safely keep treasured things—dried flowers from a special occasion, marriage certificates, especially dear photos, money, et cetera. In those homes, the reason that the treasures are safe is that those Bibles are never used. Often a Bible will be found in the midst of a stack of books. This writer has seen ash trays and beer bottles placed atop people’s Bibles. We ought to have such reverence for the Word of God that we would shudder to think of anything being placed above it. It ought always to be on the top, both physically, and in our minds and hearts. If Jesus were to come into your home this afternoon, would you flick your ashes on Him. Jesus is the Word of God, the Creator of all, and your Bibles are the Word of God or they are merely books.

The essence of God, the attributes of God are unchangeable. This is known as the doctrine of immutability. It is impossible for God to change for the better or the worse. However, while He does not change in His essence, He has changed in His form. For many years this study was known as the hypostatic union. More recently it has been referred to by theologians as the study of the Theanthropic Person (from two Greek words Theos and anthropos, the God-man).