Dancing with the Stars

“The God of the Bible is spoken of as a personal being with intellect, emotion, and will,” writes world-renowned religion expert Robert Morey in his book The Islamic Invasion: Confronting the World’s Fastest Growing Religion. “This is in contrast to Allah, who is not to be understood as a person. This would lower him to the level of man. To the Muslim, the idea that Allah is a person or a spirit is blasphemous because this would demean the exalted One."

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"There’s an old theological concept related to the Trinity called ‘the dance of deity," says Jordan. "It’s not talking about doing the ragtime, jitter bug or the Macarena; it’s talking about each member of the godhead working in harmony, flowing to the rhythm of what they’re doing together. It’s an ancient idea that goes back to the early days of Christianity.”

“While there’s only one essence and being of deity, there are three people who possess that essence; that eternal, infinite essence of deity: God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. We give them those three titles because they are titles of relationships within the godhead.

“God wants you to understand that the way He lives is in relationship. He’s not a god sitting off on a stump by himself like Allah, who is isolated. You know, if someone is isolated or standoffish, you don’t know whether you can talk to them or not. You don’t know whether they want to talk to anybody or not.

“But if they come out and give you a glad hand and a smile and start talking to you . . . you ever get on an elevator with somebody?

"The godhead is not one individual sitting off over there and, by the way, if you’re isolated, you don’t have a lot of social skills necessarily to deal with other people.

“So when you recognize the idea of God the Holy Spirit being a part of that--Jesus is saying, ‘I’m going to receive this truth the Father gave me and I give to Him, and what He gives to you will be what He got from me, and what He got from me is what I got from the Father and we’re all working together in this.’

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“John 16:13 says, ‘Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come.’

“First, understand the Holy Spirit is a person. Two, He’s God. He can do what only God can do. He can show you things to come. But as ‘the Spirit of truth,’ what is truth? Jesus says in the next chapter, ‘sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth.’

“He’s the Spirit who’s going to write the word of truth and a part of what He does when He writes the word of truth, is show you things to come. What Jesus is doing here is He’s literally giving a pre-authorization for the writing of the New Testament.

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Regarding Israel’s false gods, God argues in Isaiah 41: 22-23, ‘Let them bring them forth, and shew us what shall happen: let them shew the former things, what they be, that we may consider them, and know the latter end of them; or declare us things for to come.

[23] Shew the things that are to come hereafter, that we may know that ye are gods: yea, do good, or do evil, that we may be dismayed, and behold it together.’

“He’s saying, ‘If you’re God, you can tell us things to come and be accurate about it.’ You see, that’s a characteristic of deity. Jesus takes that characteristic of ‘God alone’ and says, ‘You know, the Spirit of truth, when He comes, He’s going to do what only God can do.’

“Not only does that passage help you understand the Holy Spirit is a person, it helps you understand that the Holy Spirit is a divine person. He’s one of the members of the godhead.

“That’s why when Peter’s dealing with Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5, it says in verse 3-4, ‘But Peter said, Ananias, why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost, and to keep back part of the price of the land?

[4] Whiles it remained, was it not thine own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power? why hast thou conceived this thing in thine heart? thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God.’

“Who’d he say he lied to in verse 3? The Holy Spirit. The Apostle Peter is not averse to saying, ‘You lied to the Holy Spirit--why did you lie to God?’

“That’s because in the Scripture, he would have understood from John 14:13 (‘And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son’) that the Holy Spirit was one member of the godhead,  and that when he lied to the Spirit of God, he was lying to God Himself.

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“With this thing about the trinity, and each member of the godhead working together in harmony, there’s a great story about David and his ‘three mighty men,’ where the Scripture says they went as one; each member of the godhead working together.

“Each member of the godhead works together in the incarnation of Christ, and in the death of Christ and in the resurrection of Christ. All working in harmony. That’s the idea of the trinity.

“People sometime say the trinity is not found in the Old Testament and people say, ‘Well, He says ‘let US make man and so forth,’ and that’s an indication there’s somebody there that he’s talking to, but somebody else will say, ‘Well, but there’s other people around there than them and He just said, ‘Watch me do it.’ People gainsay those things.

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“Here’s a passage that really isn’t a gainsaying passage. Isaiah 48:16: ‘Come ye near unto me, hear ye this; I have not spoken in secret from the beginning; from the time that it was, there am I: and now the Lord GOD, and his Spirit, hath sent me.’

“The one who’s talking is Jehovah. Verse 12 says, ‘Hearken unto me, O Jacob and Israel, my called; I am he; I am the first, I also am the last.’

“In Revelation 1, when the Lord Jesus Christ identifies Himself as ‘The Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last,’ He’s referring back to a verse like this one in Isaiah.

“So the person who’s talking here is going to be God the Son, the second member of the godhead, the Lord Jesus Christ.

“Isaiah 48:16 says, ‘Come ye near unto me, hear ye this; I have not spoken in secret from the beginning; from the time that it was, there am I: and now the Lord GOD, and his Spirit, hath sent me.’

“Notice there are three people here. In a King James Bible, when you see the word ‘LORD’ in all uppercase letters (notice verse 17) what does that tell you? It’s the word ‘Jehovah.’ Behind the English word there is the Hebrew word ‘Jehovah.’

“When you see in verse 16 that GOD is in all caps, that’s what it’s telling you there too. So in verse 16 when it says GOD, that’s Jehovah, but when it said Lord (first cap and then lowercase), that word Lord there is Adonai Jehovah.

“Every time you see that construction of ‘Lord GOD’ with that kind of capitalization, that tells you that what the Hebrew text is saying is Adonai Jehovah. That is always God the Father.

“One of the identifying marks in your Bible, when you say Adonai Jehovah, you’re talking about the first person of the godhead.

“In verse 17, when it refers to LORD, all caps, that’s Jehovah Elohim. Most of the time the word ‘God’ is the translation of the word Elohim. So in verse 17 when it says, ‘LORD thy God,’ that will always be God the Son, the second person of the godhead. There they all three are right there.

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“Isaiah 61:1 says, ‘The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound.’

“There’s God the Holy Spirit, sent by the Father, to anoint the Lord Jesus Christ. You see that in Matthew 3. God the Father speaks from heaven, the Holy Spirit comes down and anoints the Lord Jesus Christ. There’s the Son, the Spirit and the Father.

“If you go back to Genesis 2:4 (‘These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens’) who made the heaven and the earth? Jehovah Elohim, the Lord Jesus Christ. John 1:3 says, ‘All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.’

“Look at Genesis 2:7: ‘And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.’

“There’s verse 8, verse 16, verse 18. Who is it that’s creating Adam, dealing with Adam, educating Adam, communicating with Adam? Jesus Christ is the spokesman of the godhead! He’s the manifest person of the godhead.

“So when you come down to chapter 3:8 (‘And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden’) you see Adam, in the garden, literally had fellowship with the Lord Jesus Christ, the second member of the godhead.

“Jesus Christ is always the one—He’s the go-between, the mediator.

“Under the old covenant, with the Holy Spirit’s ministry, He would come, do things and go back home. They didn’t have a permanent ministry. There were many things He didn’t do. He didn’t regenerate people. He didn’t do a bunch of things, because those were new covenant ministry things. Now Jesus is talking to them about what He’s going to do with the new covenant and they’re going to kick the thing into high gear.

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“I John 5:7 says, ‘For  there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.’ This is the great Trinitarian verse in the Bible.

“Our congregation members, Nick and Helen, got kicked out of a ministry over this verse. They were going to a church on Chicago’s south side and they noticed that in their doctrinal statement, where they had a statement about God being a trinity, that it didn’t have that verse in it. So Nick asked the preacher why it wasn’t there, and the long and short of it was they got put out in the road.

“My point is, you need to watch doctrinal statements. When you pick up somebody’s doctrinal statement, and you look at the statement about God and about the trinity, you’ll be shocked how often this verse doesn’t appear. If you didn’t want to believe in the trinity, you wouldn’t want I John 5:7 in your bible because it pretty much ties the rag to the bush for you. That’s a verse people like to leave out.

“I John 5:7 is the clearest, most profound verse in Scripture about the trinity, but it’s left out of all the new bible versions. It exists in the Received Text. It’s in the bibles our ancestors have used and you can find it all the way back to the Sixth Century in versions and translations that people were using all over Europe and Africa. But the modern critical text leaves it out and so the folklore is it shouldn’t be there."

(new article tomorrow)