|
|
WHO IS YOUR SAVIOR?
By
Bertrand L. Comparet
All Christians denominations agree that Yahshua is our
Savior, the scriptural authority for this is very clear. II Peter 1:11,
2:20 & 3:18 speaks of our Savior, Yahshua. I John 4:14 says,
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the
Savior of the world." Christians also agree that Yahshua is the Son of
Yahweh, upon good authority. Mark 1:1 reads, "The beginning of
the gospel of Yahshua, the Son of God." John 1:34 states, "And
I saw, and bare record, that this is the Son of Yahweh." Matthew 3:17
tells us, "And lo, a voice from heaven saying, This is My beloved Son, in
whom I am well pleased".
At least some of the churches also recognize that Yahshua
is our Redeemer, although they haven't any clear idea of what redemption is.
This is also on scriptural authority. Galatians 4:4-5 says, "But
when the fullness of the time was done, Yahweh sent forth His Son, made of a
woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that
we might receive the adoption of sons." Finally, some of them take note
that Yahshua is the Word, a phrase only used by the apostle John.
"And the Word was made 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."
Having agreed on these descriptive titles, the area of
disagreement begins when the churches have to answer the question, who was He
and what was He? They all agree Yahshua is in some way connected with the
Godhead. Through the centuries there has been bitter and sometimes murderous
disagreement as to the exact nature or degree of His divinity. Such
disagreements spring from lack of knowledge of the scriptures by substituting
man's doctrines for the word of Yahweh. Let's look a little deeper into this.
Have we one God, or three?
Under
the Old Testament, the theologians were familiar with one God. Because the
priests and scribes had, fraudulently changed the records and the manuscripts of
the scriptures, they called that one God "Lord", as I explained in my
lesson, "Who is Your God?@
The people were told that Yahshua was also Lord, so some decided there must be
two Lords. The Holy Spirit, wrongly translated Holy Ghost in the King James
Bible, is spoken of in the New Testament as greatly exalted. Maybe they had
better not offend Yahshua by assigning Him any lower position.
Therefore, many began arguing that we had a trinity
of Gods. Since this so obviously led right back to the pagan polytheism, they
had to develop another dogma to meet this problem, that the three Gods
between them, constituted but one God. None of them could understand how this
could be, so they said it was a great mystery and to them it was! Perhaps it
might be similar to the way many thousands of stockholders in Standard Oil
Company make but one corporation out of them all.
By the fourth century A.D., the controversy between the
Trinitarians and the believers in one God, the later led by Arius, became so
bitter that Emperor Constantine called the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D.
Constantine commanded the divided church to settle its controversy. At this
council, the Trinitarians outnumbered the Arians, so on a numerical vote basis
alone, and the doctrine of the trinity was adopted. Perhaps some of you are
thinking of I John 5:7 reading, "For there are three that bear
record in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are
one." This verse wasn't in the original; it was added centuries after John
wrote his epistles. None of the early Christian writers quote this verse. It was
not cited as authority for the Trinitarian position at the Council of Nicea.
They surely would have triumphantly read it, if it had been in existence then.
The first mention of this addition appears in the sixth
century A.D., apparently just written in the margin as a comment in some Latin
copies. Not one Greek manuscript, earlier than the sixteenth century contains
it. Bible scholars are practically unanimous in their agreement that it was not
in the original. Accordingly, it is omitted from most of the modern English
translations such as the English Revised Bible, American Revised Bible, Moffatt,
Ferrar Fenton, Smith & Goodspeed, Weymouth, Rotherham, Panin, New World
Translation, etc.
How do we answer this question, are there three Gods, or
only one? Only from the Bible, not from church hierarchies, can we hope to get
the true answer. Naturally we first find it in the Old Testament. Deuteronomy
6:4 records, "Hear O Israel! Yahweh our God is one God." As
always, this is confirmed in the New Testament, for Yahshua said in Mark
12:29, this was the first of the commandments. This doesn't look much like a
trinity, does it?
Let's go on a little bit farther. According to the
Trinitarians Yahshua, being the Son is one of the three Gods. What does the
Bible say about Him? Remember, all the churches agree that Yahshua is the
Savior, so let's find out who the Savior is. We find it first in Isaiah
43:10-11, "Ye are My witnesses, saith Yahweh, and My servant whom I
have chosen: that ye may know and believe Me, and understand that I am He;
before Me there was no God formed, neither shall be after Me. I, even I, am
Yahweh; and beside Me there is no Savior." Yahweh's Bible is always
consistent. In Hosea 13:4 we find, "Yet I am Yahweh thy God, from
the land of Egypt, and thou shalt know no god but Me: for there is no Savior
beside Me".
Old Testament? Certainly, but listen to the New
Testament. I Timothy 1:1 begin, "Paul, an apostle of Yahshua by the
commandment of Yahweh our Savior and Yahshua, which is our hope." In
I Timothy 2:3 Paul says, "For this is good and acceptable in the
sight of Yahweh our Savior." But Paul isn't the only one who says
this. Jude 25 says, "To the only wise God our Savior be glory
and majesty, dominion and power, both now and forever." We see that Yahweh
is our Savior and He says, "Beside Me there is no Savior."
Therefore, since the churches agree that Yahshua is our Savior, He must be
Yahweh Himself. This should not surprise anybody. Isaiah 7:14 prophesied
it, "Therefore Yahweh himself shall give you a sign: Behold, a
virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call His name Emmanuel, which
means God with us. Isaiah 9:6 makes it unmistakably clear, "For unto
us a child is born, unto us a Son is given: and the government shall be upon His
shoulders: and His name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty
Yahweh, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace".
The churches also agree that Yahshua is our Redeemer,
but who is the Redeemer? Isaiah 43:14 speaks of Yahweh, your Redeemer,
the Holy One of Israel. Isaiah 44:6 continues, "Thus saith Yahweh,
the king of Israel and his Redeemer." Isaiah 48:17 records,
"Thus saith Yahweh thy Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel: I am Yahweh
thy God". Again we see that Yahshua must necessarily be Yahweh himself, for
it is Yahweh who is our Redeemer. Then the apostle John calls Yahshua the Word.
Who is the Word? John 1:1, 3 tells us, "In the beginning was the
Word: and the Word was with God, and the Word was Yahweh."
Yahshua confirms this in John 8:19, "If ye
had known Me, ye should have known My father also." In John 10:30,
Yahshua says, "I and My Father are one." John 12:45 continues,
"He that seeth Me seeth Him that sent Me." In John 14:6-9 we
read, "Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man
cometh unto the Father but by Me. If ye had known Me, ye should have known My
Father also: and from henceforth, ye know Him and have seen Him. Philip
saith unto Him, Master, show us the Father, and it sufficeth us. Yahshua saith
unto him, Have I been so long a time with you, and yet thou hast not known Me,
Philip? He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father."
This leaves us only one remaining question. Is Yahshua
the only God, just the Son of God, or just one God out of three? Never turn to
the churchmen for the answer, why add their confusion to your own? You can only
get the answer from the Bible, the word of Yahweh. Trinitarians speak of three
Gods, consisting of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit was
mistranslated Holy Ghost in the King James Bible. Let's continue on and find out
who these three are. First, let us define the words themselves. By definition,
the father must be the one who begot the son. The son must be the one who was
begotten. We have already seen that Yahshua is the Father as well as the Son.
What of the Holy Spirit? The Bible tells us that the Holy Spirit is the Father
who begot the Son, Yahshua.
Matthew 1:20 reads, "But while he thought on
these things, behold, the angel of Yahweh appeared unto him in a dream saying,
Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary, thy wife: for that
which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit." Luke 1:35
records, "And the angel answered and said unto her the Holy Spirit
shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee:
therefore also that the holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called
the Son of God." The Holy Spirit is the one who begot the Son, and
therefore, by the very definition of the word, the Holy Spirit is the Father.
In John 14:16-18, 26 Yahshua says, "I will
pray the Father and He shall give you another Comforter, that He may abide with
you forever: even the spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it
seeth Him not, neither knoweth Him: but ye know Him, for He dwelleth in you, and
shall be in you. I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you. But the
Comforter, which is the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, he
shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever
I have said unto you."
Note this, the Comforter whom the Father will send is the
Holy Spirit. Who is it that shall come as the Comforter? Yahshua said, "I
will come unto you." Therefore Yahshua being God, and also the Father, is
also the Holy Spirit. This must be so, for we have seen that the Holy Spirit is
the Father who begot the Son.
So, the trinity of three Gods boils down to just one God.
A god who is spirit, the Holy Spirit. As the Holy Spirit, He begot a mortal body
for His own use when He was to come as our Savior and Redeemer. In thus
begetting the body, the Holy Spirit became the Father. He Himself inhabited that
body which the Holy Spirit had begotten and in so doing became the Son. This was
one person acting in three capacities.
Finally, what is His name? In nearly all our English
language translations of the Bible, we find it written Jesus. We can be sure
that this is not the name by which He was known when He lived
among us in human form. Practically all of the English Bibles are translated
from Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. Greek was a foreign language to the
people of Palestine. However, some of the better educated among the Palestinians
spoke Greek in addition to their native language Aramaic.
The Greek manuscripts are translations of the original
Aramaic, which was the language spoken by Yahshua and all His friends and
disciples. In Greek Yahshua's name was written Iescus, and pronounced
Ee-ay-sooce. That part of the Christian church, which was in the Western Roman
Empire, where Latin was the official language of government, as well as the
native tongue of most of those who lived in Italy, eventually translated the
Bible into Latin. The translations that were made by Jerome, about 400 A.D.,
became the official translation of the Roman Catholic Church.
In Latin, the Savior's name is written either Iesus, or
Jesus and pronounced Yay-sooce. When the first English translations were made,
the long familiar spelling Jesus was kept. This was not difficult because the
letter "J" was for many centuries, just another form of the letter
"I", as it still is in the Germanic and Scandinavian languages. Early
English had inherited this from its beginnings as the Anglo Saxon language. Not
until much later did the letter "J" develop its modern English sound.
As you learned in my lesson entitled, "Who Is Your
God?@
the name of God in Hebrew is Yahweh. This also appears a number of times
in a shortened form Yah. In Hebrew, Ho-shay-ah means Savior. You are
familiar with it as the name of a prophet who wrote one of the books of the Old
Testament. Our English translations pronounce it Hosea. By combining Yah (God)
and Savior, the Hebrew name Yeh-ho-shoo-ah was formed, more familiar to us in
the Anglicized form of Joshua.
There is every reason to believe this was the name of our
Savior. He did come in the name of the Father, Yah, and the short form
of Yahweh; with the further statement that Yah was Savior. We note
that Yahshua said in John 5:43, "I am come in My Father's
name." When Yahshua entered the city of Jerusalem, on His last visit there,
which led to His crucifixion, the people greeted Him with joyous enthusiasm, as
recorded in Matthew 21:9. "And the multitudes that went before, and
that followed, cried saying, Hosanna to the son of David: blessed is He that
cometh in the name of Yahweh; Hosanna in the highest".
Some people have said the Iesous is the Greek equivalent
of Yeh-ho-shoo-ah, but this is not true. The Greek equivalent, or translation of
Yah-savior would be Yah-soter. In all cases where the translators took
Hebrew or Aramaic names and tried to roughly translate them with Greek letters,
they bungled the job very badly. There is not one Old Testament name, which
appears in the Greek New testament in a form very similar to the original
Hebrew. Iesous is an attempt to write Yeh-ho-shoo-ah in Greek, botched as usual.
To sum it all up, the Bible clearly proves that our
Savior, Yahshua the Christ, was Yahweh. Yahweh had taken human form in order to
make the sacrifice for our sins on the cross. He is the Father, Son, and the
Holy Spirit. Even His name in Hebrew and Aramaic, proclaims that He was Yahweh,
God the Savior. Remember that Yahshua told His disciples, "He that hath
seen Me hath seen the Father." Yahshua will soon return to reign as King
of Kings!! Then, we too will be able to see the Father. |