Chapter 12. Yahweh and His Relationship to Jesus

The first part of this chapter is meditative. Let us begin with the beauty and splendor of Yahweh our God:

One thing I ask of Yahweh, one thing I seek:

to dwell in Yahweh’s house all the days of my life,

to enjoy the sweet­ness of Yahweh, to seek out his temple.

(Psalm 27:4, NJB)

The Psalmist speaks of “the sweetness of Yahweh” (NJB) or “the beauty of the Lord” (ESV). And where is His beauty seen? Most wonderfully in His love and concern for His people, notably the afflicted and the destit­ute, as seen in His taking care of their phy­sical and spiritual needs:

The Old Testament portrays Yahweh as the perfect embo­di­ment of good­ness, lovingkindness, and compassion. This picture is carried over in­to the New Testament in which it is said of Him: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son” (Jn.3:16).

Yahweh’s lovingkindness is exemplified in Jesus in his encounter with a Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well (Jn.4:7ff). Jesus was a total stranger to her, yet she wasn’t intimidated by his pre­sence. He con­fronted her about her sins, yet without humiliating her or driving her away, but in a way that liber­ated her from her sins. That is the kind of spiritual help that she, a sinner, would wel­come.

One of the verses we just quoted, 1 John 4:9-10, brings out the vast­ness of God’s love for us in His plan of salvat­ion through Jesus Christ. But just a few verses later, John inverts the matter and talks about our love for God and His people:

The one who is loved by God must love His children. But how do we apply this teaching? It is familiar enough to us, yet many are trou­bled by it, for the faults and failings of some brothers and sisters are all too ob­vious. They are hard to love, yet God has no problem loving them. He dwells in believers, the temple of God (1Cor.3:16), and that would include the brother or sister we find hard to love. We are happy to love God whom we cannot see, and also Jesus Christ whom we don’t see because he is at the right hand of God.

Yet many believers love God and Christ more than them­selves and their loved ones even though they cannot see God. Although most unbelievers pay no attent­ion to God because they don’t see Him, yet all belie­vers were at one time unbe­lievers. What had caused them to change their hearts to­wards God whom they cannot see? How can God who was not real to them suddenly become real? Is this a shift in intellectual belief or is it a spir­itual transform­ation that had caused them to say with Paul, “I know whom I have believed” (2Tim.1:12)?

True belie­vers exper­ience God’s transforming work in their hearts and minds, the radi­cal­ness of which is expressed in the words, “Form­erly you were darkness but now you are light in the Lord” (Eph.5:8). His transform­ing power gives us life, and changes the world around us.

The foundation stone on which to build a compre­hensive understand­ing of salvation is the truth that salvat­ion is from Yahweh. It runs through the Bible and is seen in the follow­ing Old Testament state­ments (all from NJB):

Salvation, like truth and light, is embodied in Yahweh. He saves us because He is salvation and He is love. He alone is our Savior: “There is no other god except me, no saving God, no Saviour except me!” (Isaiah 45:21, NJB) “You know no God but me, and besides me there is no savior” (Hosea 13:4).

This statement is meaningful in the light of the Father’s unchanging perfection. God’s perfect­ion is constant because He is “the Father of lights with whom there is no var­iation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17), as seen also in the Old Testament: “I Yahweh do not change” (Mal.3:6).

The meaning of “Yahweh” has been the topic of much schol­arly discuss­ion (see Appendix 3) and is well expressed in the descript­ion, “He who is, who was, and who is to come” (Rev.1:4,8; 11:17; 16:5), and “from everlast­ing to everlasting you are God” (Psa.90:2), and “the living God” (Josh.3:10; Psa.42:2; Jer.10:10; Mt.16:16; Rom.9:26; 1Tim.4:10).

To the eternal God, there is neither past nor future. He always is. By contrast, we finite beings perceive time as past, present, and future. In the blink of an eye, one second in the future is one second in the past. The present is the constant flux of the future moving to the past, and we are like fish swim­ming in a stream. We live in the flow of time and aim to make the most of it.

Because a rock symbolizes stability and unchangeable­ness, God is said to be our Rock and our Savior:

Yahweh is called the Rock some 30 times in the Psalms. To rest upon the Rock is to take shelter in it. Yahweh saves those who put their trust in Him, “the rock of my salvation” (Psa.89:26; 95:1). The Rock is not a static object but the living God: “Yahweh lives, and blessed be my rock, and exalted be the God of my salvation” (Psa.18:46; 2Sam.22:47). This is the basis of the oath “as Yahweh lives” which oc­curs some 28 times in the OT. Yahweh would often make an oath or de­claration on the basis of His being alive: “As I live, declares Yahweh,” a declaration that occurs 14 times in Ezekiel alone.

Because of God’s rock-like, unchanging quality, He doesn’t change His mind about the promises He has made:

Yahweh is the center of the Old and New Testaments. Hence Paul speaks of the gospel as “the gospel of God” (Rom.1:1; 15:16; 2Cor.11:7; 1Th.2:2,8,9) or “the gospel of the grace of God” (Acts 20:24). Jesus likewise preached the “gos­pel of God” (Mk.1:14), the good news of Yahweh.

But Yahweh’s gospel focuses on Jesus the Messiah (the Christ), for God was in Christ recon­ciling the world to Him­self (2Cor.5:19). Hence the New Testament also proclaims the gospel of Jesus Christ the perfect man, for it is through this perfect man that God reconciles the world to Himself. It is as perfect man that Jesus Christ is the savior of the world.

Mark speaks of “the gospel of Jesus Christ” (Mk.1:1). Paul speaks of “the gospel of our Lord Jesus” (2Th.1:8); in the next chapter he says that God “called you through our gospel so that you may obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2:14). God’s intention is that through the gospel, the believer may participate in Jesus’ glory. God does not glorify Jesus only for Jesus’ sake but for ours as well.

It is crucial for us to understand the nature of the spiritual union of Yahweh and Jesus, the unique Son and perfect man. Jesus speaks of this union when he says, “Just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us” (John 17:21). The last clause, “that they also may be in us,” indicates that this union is meant to include believers. This is seen in Paul’s state­ment, “He who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him” (1Cor.6:17).

But in reality, because of our imperfect­ion, our union with God is less intim­ate than the union of God and Christ as expressed as “you in me, I in you”—a union that is not to be understood in terms of a com­mon substance within the Trinity, a quasi-mat­erial con­cept fab­ricated by the Gen­tile church but is found nowhere in the Bible. The spiritual union of Yahweh and Jesus means that they can­not be sepa­rated in God’s plan of salvat­ion. In the work of salvation, Jesus’ role as the Lamb of God is crucial, for by it he be­comes the expiation that atones for man’s sins.[1]

Through atonement in Christ, God recon­ciles man to Himself and gives him the price­less gift of eternal life by which redeemed man becomes a new creation in Christ. The sacrifice of Jesus negates the death-dealing effects of sin, and gives life to all who believe. Christ is a life-giving spirit (1Cor. 15:45) to those who have faith and are mem­bers of his body, the church, of which he is the head. They par­take of God’s divine nature (2Pet.1:4) and become His people and special possess­ion. Such are the rich blessings that Yahweh has bestowed on believers through Christ.

In the New Testament, Yahweh is spoken of as “Father”. This was how Jesus addressed God in prayer, and he would some­times use a more intimate term of address, “Abba,” which is the Aramaic equivalent of Papa or Daddy.

The Greek for “father” (patēr) occurs 413 times in the New Testament. About 60% of the occurrences refer to God as Father, with 136 of these found in John’s Gospel.

In the Old Testament, the Israelites addressed Yahweh as Father (“You, Yahweh, are our Father,” Isa.63:16) but often in a formal manner, e.g., to say that Yahweh is our Father on account of His being our Creator: “Is He not your Father who created you, who made and established you?” (Dt. 32:6); “Have we not all one Father? Has not one God created us?” (Mal. 2:10). This formality is bridged over in the New Testa­ment yet without dimin­ishing our rever­ence for God. The essence of NT spiritual­ity lies in a new way of relating to Yahweh as our Father, who loves and cares for His people.

The intimacy with God our Father is the dynamic force in the believ­er’s life in Christ, and is achieved through mutual indwelling: “I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you” (Jn.14:20). Since we are in Christ and Christ is in the Father, we are in the Father (“that they also may be in us,” Jn.17:21). For this to be a reality, we must ex­per­ience it and not just analyze it intellectually. This intim­acy is made possible by the indwelling Spirit who moves God’s people to cry out “Abba” (Rom.8:15; Gal.4:6). If anyone does not relate to God as Abba, he is not one of God’s people.

It is our relationship with Yahweh the living God that makes the gos­pel the good news it really is. Neither Judaism nor Islam speaks of a relationship with God in a way that is as intimate, yet the sad truth is that even among Chris­tians, few experience this kind of intimacy. For most Christians, the religion called Christianity is as formal and external as any other, some­times more so. Worse yet, the heresy of trinitar­ianism has re­moved Yahweh, whom Jesus calls the only true God, from our focus and line of sight.

But if we are united with God, what is amazing, even sublime, is the conjoining of the majes­tic name of Yahweh with the loving respect we show Him by calling Him “Abba” or “Papa”. It is a remarkable juxtaposition of opposites: the omnipotent God and a helpless child; the Almighty and the weak; the Most High and the most lowly; the infinite and the finite; the Ever­lasting God and the one whose “days are like grass and the flower of the field” (Ps.103:15).

This gives new perspective to the words, “Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the king­dom of heaven” (Mt. 18:3). It is young children who call their fathers “Papa” or “Daddy” or, in Aramaic, “Abba”. Any­one who thinks he has been a Christian long enough to out­grow address­ing Yahweh as “Papa” has not yet under­stood the intim­acy of this living relationship. In the final days of Jesus, in the crisis in which he found him­self, Jesus still addressed Yahweh as “Abba, Father” (Mk. 14:36). We like­wise call God “Abba” because of the deep work of the Spirit within us:

God wants us to call Him “Abba” and to have a liv­ing relation­ship with Him. This is established when Yahweh reaches out to us in love, and we respond to Him with all our heart, soul, and strength (Dt.6:5; Mt.22:37).

Jewish piety has moved towards a less inti­mate relation­ship with God by adopting a degree of formality in relating to Him even to the extent of not pronouncing the name Yahweh. This name has been replaced with Adon­ai, a formal and distant form of address equi­valent to “Lord” or “Sir”. It is only natural to have hesitations about address­ing one’s Lord and Mas­ter by his personal name. So over time it was taught that the name Yahweh must never be uttered even though the Bible encourages God’s peo­ple to proclaim the name and even to make an oath by it (Dt.10:20; Jer.12:16). The pro­hibit­ion of uttering the name Yahweh was a later, post-exilic devel­op­ment in Juda­ism. In early Jewish history, Yah­weh’s name was “regul­arly pro­nounced with its proper vowels,” according to the Jewish work, Encyclopedia Judaica (see Appendix 1 of the present book). But irrespect­ive of what we have done to God’s name, the fact remains that Jesus taught his disciples a new way of relating to God, namely, add­ressing Him as Abba, Daddy.

Trinitarians take this verse, John 14:6, as provid­ing evidence for the deity of Jesus. But the meaning of these words is already explained by Jesus himself, and we don’t need to make them mean what they don’t mean. Nothing in this verse says that Jesus is God. What Jesus does instead is to declare that the three­fold funct­ion of his work—as the way, the truth, and the life—is summed up in the conclud­ing words, “No one comes to the Father except through me”. Our final desti­nation and object­ive is not Jesus Christ but God the Father, and we come to Him through Jesus who is “the way”—thus ruling out any other way.

Truth and life are also mentioned because they are linked to the way: Jesus is the true and living way. The words “truth” and “life” cannot be plucked out of this con­text to make the claim that since Jesus is the truth and the life, he is God.

The fact that “truth” and “life” are vital concepts in John’s Gospel can be seen in the following statistics. John’s Gospel has 20 instances of the Greek word alētheia (“truth”), the highest in the New Testament, the next highest being Rom­ans and First John (8 times each). The word zōē (“life”) in decreasing order of fre­quency: 32 times in John’s Gospel, 17 times in Revelation, 14 times in Rom­ans, 10 times in 1 John. These are from John’s writ­ings except those in Romans.

These statistics confirm what we have just said, that truth and life are fundamental concepts in John’s Gospel. Hence their ap­pearance in John 14:6 is not something that can be torn out of the broader context and made to prove Jesus’ deity. A look at the other instances of “truth” and “life” in the Bible will negate the misuse of these two import­ant and ubi­quitous words. Yahweh’s truth and life—which are embodied in Jesus—will bring the one who be­lieves in Jesus into a dynamic faith that includes truth and life. The believer part­ici­pates in these spiritual realities that are ultim­ately found in Yahweh, the “living and true God” (1Thess.1:9).

John the Baptist draws from Isaiah 40:3 (“the way of Yahweh”) his pro­clam­ation of “the way of the Lord” in John 1:23. Jesus later speaks of “the way” to his disciples: “You know the way to where I am going” (Jn.14:4). Then Thomas says, “We do not know where you are going,” and this leads to John 14:6, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” To know Jesus is to know him who is the way. The “way” is not a teach­ing derived from the vari­ous sects in the time of Jesus but some­thing embodied in the per­son of Jesus, who is the way, and in whom the truth and the life will empower with new life those who believe in him.

The three principles—the way, the truth, and the life—are insepar­ably linked. It is the integration of the three that takes us to the Father, who is the source of all three. Truth and life are not independent of each other, but are integral elements of the way. Yet trinitarians pull this verse apart, out of con­text, and make it mean “I am the truth and the life” in some absolute divine sense.

But Jesus cannot possibly be “the life” in the absolute sense because his own life depends on the Father’s: “I live because of the Father” (Jn.6:57); “For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself” (5:26).

When we see that the message of John 14:6 is our coming to the Father, we are left wondering why this verse is even taken as a proof text of Jesus’ deity. Jesus is not the final destination but the way to the destination.

But for us to go to the Father, it is not enough to know our destination. We must first deal with the sin that is impeding our pro­gress. Sin is a fearful reality both in the world around us and within our hearts. All around us is a famine of spiritual truth, and within us is the lack of life, for man is “dead in trespasses and sins” (Eph.2:1). But Jesus draws us into God’s truth and life, for Jesus the perfect man embodies these qualities in himself even if his own life is derived from the Father’s (“I live because of the Father,” Jn.6:57). Jesus is the way to the Father, for his life is wholly focused on God and he is the only media­tor between God and man (1Tim.2:5).

The three elements in “I am the way, the truth, and the life” are promin­ent in Psalms and Proverbs. In the LXX (the Greek Old Testa­ment), “way” (hodos, ὁδός) occurs 94 times in Pro­verbs and 79 times in Psalms, more than in any other book; “truth” (alētheia, ἀλήθεια) occurs 59 times in Psalms, more than in any other book; “life” (zōē, ζωή) occurs 38 times in Proverbs and 25 times in Psalms, more than in any other OT book. Hence the way, the truth, and the life are three key concepts in the wisdom books of Psalms and Proverbs, as also in John’s Gospel. These three principles (the way, the truth, the life) link the three books—Psalms, Proverbs, John —together, giv­ing us new insight into Jesus’ state­ment that the Scriptures testify about him (Jn.5:39). Vincent Taylor makes a helpful comment on John 14:6:

When we look at the intimate union of the Father and the Son, we can­not help but reflect on our own situation and confess that sin does indeed sep­arate the sinner from God: “But your iniquit­ies have sepa­rated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear” (Isa.59:2, NIV). But Jesus who is perfectly sinless and obed­ient to the Father is able to have unhindered fellowship with Him as no one else can. Jesus is the only person in humanity who through perfect sinless­ness and doing the things pleasing to God (Jn.8:29) has this unique commun­ion with Yahweh.

The wonderful message of the closeness between God the Father and the man Christ Jesus is lost to the trinitarian for whom such intimacy is thought to be possible only between two divine persons and not be­tween God and man. In trinitarianism, the intimacy between God the Father and God the Son is taken for granted because it is internal to the triune Godhead. The wonderful truth that God and man can have a rela­tionship as deep as that between God and Christ is rejected by trinita­rians at an enor­mous spiritual loss. The sweetness of the commu­nion between Yahweh and the man Christ Jesus ought to inspire every believer to a closer walk with God. Yet trinitar­ianism robs the believer of that inspira­tion by suppressing the wonder­ful truth that we can enter into the same communion with the Father if we follow in Jesus’ steps.

The closeness between God and Jesus, and that between Jesus and his dis­ciples, are expressed in the Greek word kolpos:

On kolpos BDAG says, “apart from the idea of dining togeth­er on the same couch [Jn.13:23], ‘being in someone’s bosom’ denotes the closest association” (italics mine).

To appreciate Jesus as the only perfect man, we need to un­der­­stand his inner communication with Yahweh his Father. To our sur­prise, God in­tends that the same kind of intercom­mun­ica­tion be established be­tween God and us, made poss­ible through the work of Christ. The failure to see this will rob us of the riches of the good news of Jesus Christ and what he had come to accom­plish for us. What is the purpose of the death of the Lamb of God if not to open a new and living way to Yahweh our Father?

But the problem for the Bible scholar is that the intercom­muni­cation between Yahweh and Jesus and the believer is not amena­ble to the type of ana­lysis demanded by “scientific theology”. If anyone tries to learn more about this intercom­munication by consulting the Bible comment­aries, he or she will soon be disappointed. That is because the commentator who doesn’t commun­icate with God in daily life won’t be able to give much illumin­ation on this vital subject. Inner com­munication with God has to do with life, spiritual life, eternal life. Life has to be lived, not talked about or analyzed. Those who don’t live this kind of life won’t know much about it except by hearsay or intellectual analysis. The highest acad­emic qualifica­tions do not quali­fy anyone to speak on the topic of intercommunication with “the Living God” (Heb.9:14).

In theological institutes today, there are aca­demics who are teaching a subject—know­ing God—which in terms of their life exper­ience they are not qualified to teach. How can anyone lecture on the spiritual dy­namics of Jesus’ life if his own life is not driven by the same dynamics? The only things that acad­emics can dis­cuss are the external issues of the gospels: date, author, genre, etc.

Theological colleges generally don’t ask their academic staff about their spiritual lives, much less whether they communicate with God. The most important requirements for employment are their academic cred­entials and doctrinal position. It seems that everyone has forgot­ten that neither Jesus nor the apostles had any academic credent­ials. What God looks for in a per­son is not his academic qualifications but whether he knows the living God.

The problem surfaces again when we come to the subject of the present book: Jesus the Only Perfect Man. Anyone who doesn’t have a living relat­ionship with God won’t be able to under­stand this topic, for he won’t be able to identify with Jesus who main­tains a continuous inner com­mun­icat­ion with the Father, as ex­pressed in, “You, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us” (John 17:21).

The mutual indwelling, whether between God and Jesus or be­tween God and His people, is ultimately between God and man, not between God and God, that is, not between “God the Father” and “God the Son” as in trinitar­ianism. The Bible nowhere speaks of a mutual indwelling of God in God. Just as Jesus is God’s temple (John 2:19), so believers are a temple of God (1Cor.3:16).

The failure to see that intercommunication with the Father is possible not only for Jesus but also for us, is a failure to see that many state­ments about Jesus in the Bible have parallel statements about belie­vers. “As he is, so are we in the world” (1Jn.4:17; NIV 2011 has, “in this world we are like Jesus”). Jesus repeatedly says that his Father lives in him, as seen in the fol­lowing verses from John’s Gospel (both ESV).

The latter verse, John 17:21, reveals an additional principle: we are in God and in Christ. Conversely, God is in us because the believer’s body is the temple of God:

Jesus also speaks of his body as the temple of God:

Here Jesus refers to his coming death (“destroy this temple,” v.19) and resur­rect­ion (“raised from the dead,” v.22). But we also see some­thing anomalous in the words, “In three days I will raise it up,” for they seem to contradict the con­sistent NT teaching that it is God the Father who raises Jesus from the dead. In fact, apart from John 2:19, every reference to Jesus’ resur­rection in the NT speaks of God the Father as the one who raises Jesus from the dead, without exception.[2] But here in John 2:19, Jesus says, “I will raise it up”; this time, it is not the Father who raises Jesus from the dead but Jesus who raises himself.

How do we handle this sole exception to the consistent New Testament teaching that it is the Father who raises Jesus? Sweep it under the carpet by letting it go? The key to resolving this is found in Jesus’ repeated declaration in the very same gospel (of John) that he does every­thing, says every­thing, and teaches everything as com­manded by the Father. When we realize that Jesus speaks only what the Father com­mands him to speak, we will see that it must have been the Father Him­self who is speaking through Jesus in John 2:19 (“I will raise it up”). This conclu­sion is strengthened by the words that appear just three verses later: “when therefore he was raised from the dead”. The words “he was raised” are translated from the Greek ēgerthē, the aorist passive of egeirō, confirm­ing that Jesus did not raise himself up.

Before we can identify with Jesus our Lord, we need to see that he is like us, the people of the world. Trinita­rianism got us started on the wrong foot by describing Jesus as “God-man” or “God incarnate,” mak­ing him a per­son we cannot under­stand, let alone identify with. Trinita­rian­ism has placed Jesus, right from his birth, on a differ­ent level from us such that he could only be regarded as an object of worship and not as a human like us, which puts the reality of his humanity in quest­ion. So we read about Jesus in the gospels with tinted glasses, and view his activ­ities as being those of a God-man and not a human being like us. As a result we can­not relate to the gospel narrat­ives about Jesus in the import­ant sense of emulat­ing his life, which is what we are called to do.

It is crucial to keep in mind that the works which Jesus does are done by the Father through him, and that the words which Jesus speaks are the words of the Father, the One who sent him and dwells in him. The follow­ing are from John’s Gospel (ESV unless otherwise noted):

In the last of these verses, Jesus says that the Father “com­manded me what to say and how to say it”. [3] So com­plete is Jesus’ submission to the Father that he says exactly what his Father wants him to say, even in the tone and manner in­tended by God.

In John’s Gospel, Jesus repeatedly says that his Father works and speaks through him in everything he does and says. This is linked to the fact that the Father has given His works to Jesus to complete and to perfect:

Jesus’ perfect completion of the works that the Father had sent him to do is crucial for man­kind’s salvation, for these works in­clude the teach­ing of God’s life-giving word and the sacrificial giving of himself on the cross as a “ransom for many” (Mt.20:28; Mk.10:45).

Yet we are to do greater works than Jesus! “Whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, be­cause I am going to the Father” (Jn.14:12, ESV). This creates a conun­drum for trinitarianism: Since trinitarians argue for Jesus’ deity on account of the works that he does, how shall we regard those who do even greater works by the same power of God that worked through Jesus and is avail­able to all who believe in him? Trin­ita­rian­ism attributes Jesus’ mira­cles such as heal­ing the sick and raising the dead to his divinity. If that were so, why would Jesus tell his follow­ers, none of whom is divine, that they will do greater works than he, or repli­cate what he has done but with greater power?

It is by God’s indwelling that Jesus functions moment by mo­ment in all that he does, and this ought to be the life prin­ciple for his disciples. The log­ic underlying this connection is uncomplicated, yet has vital spirit­ual conse­quences, for if the Father does all these things through Jesus, would He not do the same through those who respond to Jesus’ call to follow him? This line of spiritual logic would be broken if Jesus is utterly different from his disciples as he is in trinitarian dogma. Trinita­rianism thus des­troys a vital principle which Jesus taught in John’s Gospel, suppressing the truth that the believ­er will do greater works than Jesus (with the important ex­cept­ion of being an atone­ment for sin) by God’s power that is avail­able to those who have faith in Jesus.

When we read the New Testament without the distorting trin­it­arian con­cepts of a later era, we will look to Jesus as the one we can emu­late and identify with, and from whom we can learn to let Yahweh dwell in us as He dwelled in Jesus. When Yahweh lives in us day by day, we will know the truth of what Jesus said about Yahweh’s power working in the believer, whe­ther it is in our preaching or teaching, or in acts of heal­ing and casting out demons.

Jesus describes himself as “a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God” (Jn.8:40). Note the sharp distinction between “man” and “God,” and how Jesus puts himself squarely on the side of humanity. The fact that Jesus is a man who is given the truth by God collides with the trin­ita­rian notion of the God-man. The words “I heard from God” mir­ror what every prophet in Israel experi­enced in their declar­ation, “Thus says the Lord” (literally, “Thus says Yahweh”).

The Old Testament prophets did not speak their own thoughts but would speak forth whatever Yahweh told them to say. Hence they would usually preface their pronounce­ments with, “Thus says Yahweh” (or in most Bibles, “thus says the Lord”). Similarly, the things that Jesus said were not his own words but those of his Father (Jn.12:49). Jesus did not use the prefatory words, “Thus says the Lord,” because Yahweh, by His dwelling in Jesus, would sim­ply speak through Jesus either directly (e.g., “destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up,” Jn.2:19) or indir­ectly (e.g., where Jesus speaks of the Father in the third person).

False prophets in the Old Testament also prefaced their pronounce­ments with “Thus says Yahweh”. So how are they to be iden­tified? Jesus says, “Be­ware of false prophets … by their fruits you will know them” (Mt.7:15-16). We discern their false­hood if holiness, a vital element of perfection, is lacking in their lives.

In his time Jesus was recognized as a prophet of Israel, and some have com­pared him to Elijah (Mt.16:14). Prophets not only foretold the future but were also teachers of the nation. Jesus himself was called “teacher” (in Matthew alone: 8:19; 12:38; 19:16; 22:16,24,36), and his wisdom was ad­mired even by his enemies (they mar­veled at his answer to the question of paying taxes to Caesar, Mt.22:17-22). But unlike the pro­phets of old, Jesus doesn’t just speak the truth, his life perfectly embo­dies it. He doesn’t just say “I live the truth” but says, “I am the truth.” That is the beauty and power of Jesus, the only perfect man.

Reflected in John’s vocabulary is the emphatic teaching—in terms of pre­ponder­ance and in terms of strong state­ments by Jesus—that Jesus is sent by God. For exam­ple, pempō (πέμπω, send) occurs 79 times in the New Test­ament, with 32 of the occur­rences in John’s Gospel and 5 in Revela­tion. No other NT book comes close to John in terms of frequency. The three synop­tics—Matthew, Mark, Luke—have only 15 occur­rences com­bined. Acts, with 11 occurrences, comes in at a distant sec­ond after John.

A study of how pempō is used in John’s Gospel will lead to the discovery that it is often used in the statement “the One who sent me” or equivalent state­ments such as “the Father who sent me” or “He who sent me”. Of the 32 instances of pempō in John, a surpris­ingly large majority, 26 to be exact, are found in such phrases. [4] This practic­ally makes “the Father who sent me” a title of God in John’s Gospel!

Another word, apostellō (ἀποστέλλω, send), with 132 occur­rences in the NT, is evenly distributed among the four gospels and Acts: Matthew 22 times, Mark 20 times, Luke 26 times, John 28 times, Acts 24 times, and the rest of the New Testa­ment 12 times.

Of the 28 occurrences in John’s Gospel, 17 refer to God the Father as the one who sent Jesus into the world.[5] Com­bining these 17 in­stances of apos­tellō and the 26 instances of pempō which carry this meaning, we have a total of 43 state­ments about Jesus as the one sent by the Father—in John’s Gospel alone! This works out to an average of two such statements per chap­ter. There are in addition three instances of apostellō in First John (4:9,10, 14) which speak of the Father sending the Son. It comes as no surprise, there­fore, that Hebrews 3:1 speaks of Jesus as the “apostle (apostolos) and high priest of our confess­ion”.

The chief mission of the one who is sent is to do the will of the one who sent him. In the case of Jesus, this is stated in John 4:34, “My food is to do the will of Him who sent me.” It would therefore be expected that thelēma (θέλημα, the will) is a significant word in John. A quick check confirms that thelēma, when referring to God’s will, occurs in Matthew 5 times, Mark once, and Luke once. It occurs 8 times in John’s Gospel which is 20% shorter than Matthew.

As the one sent by the Father, Jesus comes in his Father’s name (Jn.5:43; 10:25), acts as his Father’s repre­sentative, and does every­thing on God’s behalf as the one authorized to act in His name. Only the one who has been sent by another can act in that person’s name. We may legitimately baptize a person in accordance with Mt.28:19 only if we ourselves have been sent by God as His servants.

In John’s Gospel, the way Jesus functioned is similar to the way the Old Testament prophets functioned. The Jews who spoke with Jesus im­mediately saw the striking similar­ities between him and the pro­phets of old, notably Elijah, who is mentioned many times in the gospels (Matthew 9 times, Mark 9 times, Luke 8 times, John twice).

There was nothing that Jesus did in his earthly ministry, with the crucial exception of being an atonement for sin, that was not paralleled by the prophets. The main difference between Jesus and the prophets lies in the unsur­passed level of Jesus’ commun­ion with the Father (Yahweh), which was made possible by his being sinless all his life. Even Isaiah, the greatest of the OT prophets, confessed his sinfulness: “I am a man of un­clean lips” (Isa.6:5). There is hardly a person who has not sinned in this way (“if any­one does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect man,” James 3:2). It doesn’t mean that God didn’t commun­icate with Isaiah, otherwise, with no one per­fect in the world, there would be no one with whom God could commun­icate! In fact the vision granted to Isaiah, that of God in His glory, is per­haps the most magni­ficent in the Old Testament.

“The Son can do nothing of his own but only what he sees the Father do­ing” (Jn.5:19). The words “sees the Father” indicate that visions of God are a common experience for Jesus. Jesus “is in the bosom of the Father” (Jn.1:18), living in the closest possible communion with God. In a state­ment famously known as “a bolt from the Johannine blue,” Jesus says: “All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” (Mt.11:27, parallel Lk.10:22) The inti­macy be­tween Jesus and his Father is so deep that Jesus is handed all things by the Father, whom Jesus ad­dresses as “Lord of heaven and earth” (Mt.11:25).

But trinitarianism makes all this superfluous, for if Jesus is God the Son, he would “automatically” have the closest poss­ible relat­ionship with God the Father by virtue of a common divine substance. The beauty of the in­timate relationship be­tween God and man, expressing the heights of what is possi­ble for man by God’s love, is simply wiped out by the trin­ita­rian teaching of Jesus as the God-man. Is there anything im­pressive about a commun­ion between “God the Father” and “God the Son,” two consubstantial persons?

The problem goes beyond that, for trinitarian doctrine makes redun­dant every God-appointed ministry and office bestowed on man such as the office of priest or king, since it would be God (as Jesus) who takes up the work that God has assigned man to do.

In trinitarianism, it is the God-man rather than man who says, “the Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor” (Lk.4:18). This goes against the principle that the preach­ing of the gospel is a task assigned to human preachers and evangelists. What hap­pens in trinitarianism is that God the Son is anointed with God the Spirit to be the Messiah, the Anointed One, whom God the Father sends into the world. Why does God the Father have to send a divine person as the Messiah? Is it be­cause no human Messiah is allowed? Why does God as God the Son do the work that God has ap­pointed man to do? The whole matter is becom­ing incom­prehen­sible. In biblical teaching, God came into the world to dwell in the man Jesus, not a divine Jesus. Does God dispense with man in the minis­try of salvation? Can God who is immortal die for man’s sins? If there is not­hing else that man can do, at the very least he can die! And dying on the cross for man’s sin was indeed what Jesus did.

After Jesus had been taken up into heaven, he was seated at the right hand of the Father. Since he is now in heaven, what is his present earthly ministry? One of the chief of his ministries is that of intercession for God’s people:

Interceding for God’s people seems to be Christ’s chief minis­try, or one of his chief ministries, at the present time. But if Christ has authority over the church as the head of the body, why would he need to plead with the Father on behalf of the church? It is because the church is not the church of Christ but the “church of God” (Acts 20:28; 1Cor.1:2; 10:32; 11:22; 15:9; 2Cor.1:1; Gal.1:13; 1Tim.3:5,15). God by His Spirit indwells, empowers, and leads the church. We are reminded of Moses who repeatedly interceded for Israel. Although Moses was appointed the head of Israel by God, it was God who dwelled in the midst of Israel, in tent or tem­ple, and who led Israel to the land of promise.

If Jesus must dedicate himself wholly to the work of inter­ceding for the church, this would indicate how precarious and im­periled is the sur­vival of the church in the world. The fact that the church, in spite of Jesus’ intercess­ion for it, could have strayed by its own choice into serious error over the past 1,800 years, is cause for dismay. Yahweh has allowed this to hap­pen for some purpose we don’t understand. Yet through these cent­uries of dark­ness, thanks to Jesus’ intercession, there has always been a faithful remnant, just as there is a faithful remnant among the Jews (Rom­ans 9 to 11). While Jesus’ inter­cession for God’s people has not been in vain, few Christians are even dimly aware of the enormity and intensi­ty of the spirit­ual battle that rages in and around the church of God.

That Jesus is now in heaven and not on earth raises the quest­ion of who is directing the church on earth, and whose presence is it that sus­tains the faithful remnant—who are called the “few” in Mt.7:14 (cf. Lk.13:23) and who by Yahweh’s grace gain entrance into life. It is un­doubtedly the Spirit of Yahweh who upholds God’s peo­ple every day in the spirit­ual battle against the evil one, the ruler of the world (Jn.12:31; 14:30; 16:11). But the major­ity of Christians today are so engaged in their own lives and earthly affairs that they, sadly, are lovers of self rather than lovers of God (2Tim.3:2-4). The import­ance of Jesus’ unceasing inter­cession for the mem­bers of his body, the church, again impresses itself upon our hearts and minds.

If intercession is one of Jesus’ chief ministries in the present age, what was his earthly ministry two thousand years ago and what meaning does it have for us today? From the portrait of Jesus given in the gospels, his earthly ministry had two central elements.

One element was the teach­ing of God’s word, the word of Yahweh, with particular focus on the kingdom of God (or kingdom of heaven), a key concept that few Christians are familiar with. To most people, “kingdom” implies a terri­tory ruled by a monarch (e.g., “Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” the official name of Saudi Arabia) or a count­ry with a constitut­ional monar­chy (e.g., “The United King­dom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland,” the offi­cial name of the United Kingdom).

But the Greek word for “kingdom” (basileia) has the primary meaning of the kingship and the royal rule of a king rather than the territ­ory he rules over, though the latter sense is not excluded. BDAG gives two main defin­itions of this word: (1) the act of ruling; a. kingship, royal power, royal rule; b. the royal reign; (2) territory ruled by a king, kingdom. The sense of territory is listed as the second rather than the first definition, but more telling is that BDAG gives ten times as many biblical and extra-biblical citations for the first defin­ition (kingship and royal rule) than for the second definition (a king’s territory). The kingdom of God is first and foremost God’s rule in the lives of His people.

The kingdom of God is also called “the kingdom of heaven,” a term that is used only in Matthew’s Gospel.[6] The equivalence of the kingdom of God and the kingdom of heaven is seen in the fact that in Mt.19:23-24, Jesus uses both terms to refer to the same thing. To the Jews, heaven is a metonym of God in much the same way that to the Chinese, heaven (天) is a metonym of God (神 or 上帝).

 

Besides the kingdom, the other central element in Jesus’ earthly ministry is his aton­ing death which is mentioned many times in the synoptic gospels using language similar to that used in plain-facts report­ing. The most expli­cit statement about his death and its pur­pose is found in Mark 10:45 (and its parallel Mt.20:28) in which Jesus says that he came “not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ran­som for many.” In the parables, Jesus gives broad hints of his death, but there is nothing as explicit as in the verse we just quoted.

It is in John’s Gospel that we see particularly deep empha­sis on Jesus’ death, begin­ning with John the Baptist’s declar­ation that Jesus is “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (Jn.1:29). No state­ment about the pur­pose of his death can be more explicit than that. The rest of John’s Gospel elabo­rates on that crucial declar­ation about the Lamb of God. The pass­ion narrat­ive, which covers the final week of Jesus’ earthly life, takes up about one third of John’s Gospel versus one quart­er in the synoptics.

Thus the four gospels, as a unity, delineate the two focal points of Jesus’ earthly ministry: In the synoptic gospels, the focal point is his teaching mini­stry and its principal content, the kingdom of God, which is also an import­ant theme in the Old Testa­ment prophets. The other focal point, pro­minent in all four gospels but especially in John, is the redemptive or aton­ing work of Jesus’ life and death.

In the New Testament letters we find both these elements. The prin­ci­ple of the kingdom is now operating in the life of the church, hence the explicit term “the kingdom” appears less fre­quently in the NT letters. The Ser­mon on the Mount, which is central to life in the kingdom of God, is now imple­ment­ed in the spirit­ual life of the church of God, the body of Christ.

Jesus’ earthly ministry has crucial meaning for us to­day. His re­deem­ing death and resur­rection have a powerful life-changing effect on believers:

No greater or more startling transformation can be imagined than what is described in these statements.

Having been nurtured in trinitarianism with its divine Jesus, we read the Bible with­out realizing that his min­istry in God’s plan of salvation is time limited. Jesus’ work is not eternally ongoing and interminable, but concludes with its successful and triumphant completion. Jesus says it is not the heal­thy but the sick who need a doctor. So what hap­pens when the doctor has suc­cess­fully healed a sick person? The patient is now one of the healthy ones who no longer need a doctor. In other words, a good doctor is one who puts himself out of business! It is the bad doctors who con­sume all the money of the sick without healing them, as in the case of a woman with an issue of blood for twelve years who “had spent all that she had, and was no better but rather grew worse” (Mk.5:25-26).

At the cross, Jesus completed his work as the sacrificial Lamb of God when he declared, “It is finished” (Jn.19:30). He later as­cended into heaven and was seated at the right hand of God; his act of sitting down signi­fied that he had com­pleted the work of atone­ment entrusted to him by the Father. This point comes out strongly in the letter to the Hebrews (“once for all,” 7:27; 9:12,26; 10:10). The sacrifice of Jesus is “once for all” in contrast to the never-ending sacri­fices of­fered in the Jerusalem temple which could ne­ver satisfactorily atone for sin and had to be re­peated perpetually. But the sac­rifice of Jesus is forever effective for the remission of the sins of those who put their trust in him, the Lamb of God slain for their salvation.

Jesus’ mission is to bring us to God, and once that has been achieved, his mission has fulfilled its purpose. What happens after Jesus has brought us to God? Does it not mean that we can now fellowship directly with God? Once Jesus has brought us into com­munion with Yahweh, his work is done, and like the good doctor, his intervention is no longer needed—unless, of course, we sin and need an advocate (1Jn.1:9; 2:1).

Is it not the same with mediation? What is a medi­ator’s role but to recon­cile two parties? And what happens after re­concilia­tion has been achieved? The services of the mediator are no longer needed. Paul says, “For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1Tim.2:5). The error of trinitarian­ism is to por­tray Christ Jesus as the one who, instead of reconciling God and man once and for all, is made the center of the whole affair by reconciling man to him­self, even stand­ing in the middle between God and man!

In the verse just quoted, 1Tim.2:5, Paul upholds bib­lical mono­theism in his affirmation that “there is one God” as a clear contrast to the humanity expressed in the words “the man Christ Jesus”. The only med­ia­tor between God and man is not God or God-man but “the man Christ Jesus” (a literal word-for-word translation of the Greek). Some Bibles (HCSB, NET, NAB, NRSV) weaken it to “Christ Jesus, himself human”. The Chinese Union Bible even manages to mistranslate “the man Christ Jesus” as “Christ Jesus, the one who came down into the world to become man” (降世为人的基督耶稣)! Just as puzzling, Dr. Constable’s Exposi­tory Notes replaces “man” with “God-man” in the state­ment, “the God-man is the only med­iator of the New Covenant between God and man”!

As in the case of the competent doctor, when a mediator’s work has been completed once and for all, he has no further mediating function to fulfill. Is he then sad about losing his job (or the doctor his patient’s busi­ness) on account of his competent and successful work? Cer­tainly not. Why would anyone think that Jesus has suffered some kind of loss for having reconciled us to God so successfully and triumphantly that he no longer needs to stand between God and us as a mediator? Much less is it conceiv­able, except in the trinita­rian mindset, that Jesus would use the situation to make him­self the center of attention and devotion.

The same can be said of Jesus’ task of subduing God’s ene­mies. In the eschatological future, after his work has been done victoriously and tri­um­phantly, Jesus will hand his kingship back to the Father and take a position that is subordinate to God for all eternity (1Cor.15:24-28).