February 12, 2006 Note: Additional Comments Added After the Original E-Mail

February 12, 2006 Note: Additional comments added after the original e-mail.

Dear Jonathan:

Thanks for the reply. I'll work thru your first group of comments here, but being lengthy, will do the entire list by snail-mail.
On the Psalm 110 matter, it remains curious that we would place great emphasis on one verse in a passage, and exclude an-other. It's the interplay between these two that poses the significance. As you acknowledge, there are two presented in verse 1. YHWH and Adoni. Where this became 'problematical' with Jewish scholars of the 200's BC was the obvious contradiction to their theological position. Verse 5 as written had YHWH where they emended it to Adonai instead. What we HAD before they altered it was a Being on the left, called YHWH, and the other on the right, Adoni in verse 1, is also called YHWH in verse 5. I thought that would be clear. It was obvious 2200 years ago. That's why they changed their texts. The problem wasn't really with the texts, it was their theological conception that was amiss.

I agree with you that we see in verse 1 TWO separate and distinct Beings. Adoni is the One we came to know as Jesus Christ (who verse 1 says was David's Lord please notice. So did David worship the wrong Lord, or was He the one recognized in the OT, as the Father YHWH hadn’t yet been revealed to man?) But then, later in the same passage, we see that 'other Being' referred to as YHWH also!

Daniel 7 presents a consistent testimony. The 'Son of man' is formally brought before the Ancient of Days.(v.13) This Son of man is none other than Jesus Christ who ascends back up thru the clouds of heaven.But we see from the previous mention and the subsequent mention that the Son of man IS ALSO the Ancient of Days (how can we even begin to identify the One described in v. 9 & 22 as anyone else than Christ?) So, there are TWO Beings called the Ancient of Days also!

You explain to me why it was that Jesus Christ used a blend of these two passages (Psalm 110 and Daniel 7) to guarantee a death sentence that Passover evening, if they're not on target in explaining His true identity.

I gave you a very lengthy list, by no means all inclusive, that proves that the One of these two Beings who created, who led Israel out of Egypt and through the wilderness, who was the manna, who was the LORD of their Sabbath, who will be the One to return to Earth and rule the nations on earth from Jerusalem is in many places called YHWH.

From: <>
To: "Richard & Marianne T" <>
Subject: One Creator God
Date: Sat, 11 Feb 2006 11:58:19 -0500
MIME-Version: 1.0

Richard,

Thankyou for your packet of articles. There is too much to comment on at length, so I will restrict myself to a few remarks:

Your explanation for Psalm 110:1 never addressed the main issue. There are two beings/persons described in the first verse. Your detours to verse 5 to beat up on the emenders are interesting, but your failure to return to the issue at hand is disconcerting. Looking closely at verse one, we learn that:

1) There are two persons being described(On this much we are agreed. There ARE two Divine Beings! To be present at that location, becoming seated at God’s right hand, Adoni can be no ordinary man.)

2) The first person is YHWH, ( Yes )the Creator,( No: The first person created nothing except thru the second (Jn.1:3 & Heb.1:2 and 11:3) the God of the Old Testament (Yes)(and NT too!)(Yes, but that wasn't known originally. That's why the second person had to come and reveal to men the existence of the first person. The YHWH known to Israel in OT times was the second person. We see in Isa. 9:6 the Son being called 'the Everlasting Father'. The one we know as the Son was knownto ancient Israelas the Everlasting Father! This 'technical point' is the essence of true Christianity. Ancient Israel all along had been dealing with the same Being. They failed to recognize Him in His physical (being born of humankind) manifestation.)

3) The second person is referred to as 'adoni' (NOT 'adonai'-- look this up is a good lexicon, not just Strong's), a title that applies to men(Again, I agree. FOR A TIME, one of these two persons divested Himself of His Glorified existence, taking on the form of physical men. During that time, He was known, and correctly so, as the Son of man, and Adoni. But to be present beside God the Father, the Everlasting Father had also to be a Divine Being. In Daniel 7:13 and Psalm 110:1 we see the re-investiture ceremony, when He was re-invested with the same Glory He had withTHE Father, (His Father, not necessarily ancient Israel's at the time), as He prayed for in John 17:5. Notice His clear statement that He'd existed with the first person before the world was (created)! A statement consistent with John 1:1-2.) ( Strongs has Adonay, JF&B has Adonai, and they give “the right hand” as a place of power, not merely a post of honor, but a seat on the throne as a Sharer in the Divine Power. ( Rev.3:21 ))

( Also, Please expand on the Adoni / Adonai comment above. I sense there may be something alluded to in the distinction. )

4) Yahoshua of Nazareth identifies himself with the adoni of Psalm 110:1(Exactly correct. He was! But at the same time, after His incarnate existence, He made legitimate claim to full equality with God in Heaven. (Phil. 2:6) ( and was restored thereto.))

Since Yahoshua is the adoni of this verse, he is therefore NOT the YHWH of this verse, else he is talking to himself!(That's right. He IS NOT talking to Himself. There are TWO. He isn’t the YHWH of verse 1 but He is the YHWH of verse 5. The YHWH at YHWH’s right hand. That’s what the first century religious leaders wouldn’t accept, causing their blindness to the obvious, and necessitating their rejection of their long-expected Messiah. )

Thus, Psalm 110:1 tells us that Yahoshua of Nazareth is NOT the God of the Old Testament.(Nope! Some faulty logic here. He said Himself, Moses wrote of me! (Jn. 5:46) Ancient Israel regarded the YHWH of their Old Testament as being their salvation. Jesus said that referred to Himself. (Jn. 5:39) (The Rock of their salvation of the time-frame of the Exodus was Christ!)Ac.4:12, If there is no salvation in any other, then who possibly could the OT be referring to than Christ?)

Psalm 110:1 is the single best evidence in the Biblethat YHWH the Creator is God the Father.( Not if you allow that Christ was the Creator, which is biblically well established!That YHWH will return to Earth to rule the nations prior to the Father's Descent (1st Cor. 15:27-28, Isa. 66:15-16 and all, Zech 14:1-9 ). What gift we receive from Psalm 110 is the clear factthat there are two persons (Divine Beings) interacting with one another!One verse that comes to mind that establishes that the Father was involved in Creation is in Hebrews 1:2 which actually corrects the perception of He being the Creator. )

Don't wiggle. Address this issue directly, without detouring to verse 5. Verse 5 is interesting, and I commend you on discovering the emendations. But don't miss verse one! ( No wiggling is necessary. This is fundamental Christianity. The wiggler is the one who sees need to dismiss one scripture over another. No, they all fit together when correctly understood. There should be no need to dismiss one of them. )

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Another issue you have never addressed is that YHWH is plainly identified as the Father in the Old Testament. Please see the attached article Our Father Revealed in the Old Testament ( Yes, He is! Their father ( notice Lk. 2:49 “my Father”, as opposed to ‘our’ Father.) He made clear that His Father wasn’t one and the same as theirs’! The God of the Old Testament was the same Being that they’d come to reject a couple of decades later. The ‘Everlasting Father’ of their awareness wasn’t yet begotten or born as the Son of our awareness until conception in early 5 BC. The Father God figure known to them was the same one identified in Isaiah 9. That Being whom they worshipped, the LORD of the Sabbath, was none other than the Being we know today as the Son! Jesus Christ was the God of the Old Testament. The True Father, Our Father (with Him, not with them) was relatively unknown prior to the first Advent. Jesus made it clear to them that His Father WASN’T their Father. If He was, their hearts would be very different. (Jn.9:54-55, & 42 ) I have no issue with the statement that the God of the Old Testament is identified as being YHWH. But the Being that it refers to must be determined from the context, as both Beings are called by that name! )

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You frequently quote Paul to support your polytheistic position (God is two). Please see the attached articleThe Monotheism of Paul describing how Paul was staunchly, strictly monotheistic, who believed that God the Father was the God of the Old Testament, and ONLY Creator God. ( This must disregard Paul as the author of the Book of Hebrews. Haven’t read the below at the point of making this comment, but my article on “ the Shema in the New Testament” covers the same subject with quite different conclusions.)

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You asked an interesting question at the end of your letter that deserves a response: "What I don't know from those of you that hold the 'One God' position is what regard you have for Jesus, as to His eternal divinity."

Reply: I can't speak for everyone who holds the One God position, but I will give you my best answer, which I believe is shared by most of the 'Ond God' folks. ( Thanks for clarifying this. I kinda thought this had to be the case, but wasn’t sure. We have a group of Messianic persuasion who believes the same. )

The simple answer is that Yahoshua (Jesus) had no eternal divinity. ( Well, you disagree with a number of clear scriptures. He said Himself that He did, referring to …”The Glory which I had with you before the world was.” Who was He talking to? Also, 2nd Pet.1:4, If we are to become partakers of the Divine Nature, then certainly He did! )

Yahoshua was a created being. His existence began at his conception, just as yours did. You did not "pre-exist" your conception and birth. Neither did Yahoshua. ( He didn’t exist as a physical being, a literal Son of God prior to early 5 BC (conception), but there are so many scriptures that affirm that He did pre-exist. I’ll list a few. )

BTW, the idea of "pre-existing" is nonsensical in itself. How can anything or anyone exist before it exists? ( Similarly, How can

something that has always existed NOT have existed? Part of our ‘problem’ is linguistic. If we hadn’t chosen to word it that way, we wouldn’t have the seeming mutual exclusion. ( We can’t adequately fathom ‘eternity’ either.) What we’re looking at is a change of FORM, having existed from eternity in Glorified form, then one YHWH taking the spirit essence of the other and reconfiguring it into a physical sperm seed capable of reproducing a physical human manifestation of His former self, bearing a strong resemblance to His Father ( Jn.1:14) ,placing it into a physical woman, with that newly conceived Being ( new in that form, but not new to existence) thereafter existing of and by physical means. That God (Jesus) had come into the flesh was very problematical with Hellenized (heavily Gnostic) Judaism of the first century! It is the essence of the Doctrine of Antichrist that John warned the late first century Church about. The idea that 1st John 4:2-3 shows being so essential a belief is the fact of Jesus Christ having come in the flesh. Not simply that He was born as a physical being, but that He had been born into the flesh, having existed previously in the Glorified Spirit form. He was Spirit, became flesh for a third of a century, then returned to that state of being he’d had previously. Gnostics had all kinds of problems with this idea, as they couldn’t conceive of God existing of corruptible matter. To them, Spirit was good, matter was evil. (See Alan Knight’s book: “Primitive Christianity in Crisis”.) Another thought, yes, in a way we did exist before conception as cells within our parents. In the case of the woman’s egg, they say all that ever will be are in place from puberty. )

To give you an idea of how Yahoshua 'existed' prior to his conception, let me illustrate a personal story:

I have four children. One day, if YHWH blesses us,I will have six. We are planning for those next two children. They 'exist' in our minds, and our plans. We have their room ready, and we have plans for their vocation (we have a family business). We have names for them. We love them. We talk about them as if they already are. We tell people about them. But they will not exist until conception. This is how it works.

The above example is how I understand YHWH God, the Father, the God of the OT, talked about his son Yahoshua in prophecy before Yahoshua existed in any way other than in his Father's plan. This well explains John 17:5, and John 17:3 (which you consistently skip!). The glory that Yahoshua had with his Father (THE ONLY TRUE GOD) before the world was, wasin plan, not literal existence.( Perhaps we can salvage some of this if we restrict the concept to the existence of the Son as the Son in human form. He wasn’t “the Son” prior to His human conception, but He did exist as one of the two YHWH’s from all eternity. There are just too many scriptures indicating that the One we know today as Jesus the Christ had existed previously in Glory, conscious of the Father (His Father to be) and interacted with the patriarch’s of old. We’ll look at some of those a little further on.) ( Note: Dr. Hoeh presented the ‘pre-existence’ of Jesus as merely a thought of the Father in a sermon at the FoT in Vail, CO in 1995. I have a transcript of that. One familiar with ancient religious philosophy recognized it as having come from the writings of Hermes. Thus, NOT a new idea. )

Jonathan

P.S. One last thing (it's hard to keep me quiet about this issue). You make much of Yahoshua's statement that "For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me: for he wrote of me." It's really not a difficult thing to discern what it was that Moses wrote of Yahoshua. We know that Yahoshua was 'that prophet' that Moses prophesied: ( Hold open for the possibility that Moses’ account was more than just this one passage. See below. )

Deuteronomy 18:15 YHWH thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; unto him ye shall hearken; ( This is OK. We need to understand that in His human form He fulfilled a role that the One who sent Him couldn’t, or that He in His pre-existent Spirit form couldn’t. But they didn’t hearken, did they? Borrowing a little logic from the paragraph above: that the ultimate Prophet is God. All legitimate prophesies originate with Him. The ‘Son’ was only a spokesman conveying what the Father gave Him to say! ( Jn. 12:49-50 ) Understand, this Prophet was not an original source in His physical manifestation. He made that plain.)

Moses wrote of Yahoshua as 'that prophet'. This isconfirmed by Peter (Acts 3).Notice that Moses was clear about this: YHWH would at a future time raise up Yahoshua as a physical prophet (of Moses's brethren). This is evidence once again that YHWHis NOT Yahoshua. Two different persons. Did Yahoshua (Jesus) raise up himself? ( No, His Father raised Him up, indicating a second being. Moses having written of Him involves a lot more than just a prophesy about a coming ‘prophet like unto himself’. Notice Luke 24:44 “…all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the Psalms concerning me.” Apparently, quite a LOT of material! )

If Jesus was the God of the Old Testament, then you have to deal with the evidence in the attached article: The LORD and the Lord. If you do nothing else, see if you can respond to the evidence that demonstrates powerfully that God the Father was the God of the Old Testament. Most people are afraid to address this issue. Be strong, and of good courage!

Are you up to the challenge? ( Read on.)

< OurFatherRevealedintheOldTestament.doc >

Our Father Revealed…In the Old Testament

Jonathan Sjørdal July 1, 2005

In the New Testament, Yahoshua (Jesus) the Messiah tells us that he came to reveal the Father: ( This would be