[17] Do not think that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill. [18] For amen I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot, or one tittle shall not pass of the law, till all be fulfilled. [19] He therefore that shall break one of these least commandments, and shall so teach men, shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven. But he that shall do and teach, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. [20] For I tell you, that unless your justice abound more than that of the scribes and Pharisees, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 5: 17-20
It is amazing, one might say diabolical, how the popular image of Christ, Christ the Good Buddy, bears absolutely no relationship to the Christ of the Bible. We live in deeply ignorant, and deeply mendacious, times. and the Church has been fully infected with these twin mothers of all heresies. Before we can follow Christ we must be absolutely clear on who He is. As CS Lewis noted:
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. … Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.
All heresies are, at bottom, Christological heresies: fundamental errors in who Christ is and what He teaches.
I wonder if people have great difficulty with the servant aspect of God, the suffering servant? They might not be able to wrap their heads around this beautiful reality and consequently equate him as a man only, thus taking his place as God for themselves. Instead of God condescending to man in order for man to learn the great love God has for man and to replicate that love, they judge incorrectly and become the God they can’t understand. Taking His place in all matters.
Again, I don’t know why some only believe in the hippie Jesus, but my guess is selfishness.
““Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword”
–Matthew 10:34
Jesus is a highly divisive personality–separating good from evil, truth from falsehood.
Nice guys don’t get crucified.
The truth, as I see it, is that God made man in His own image and ever since, man has been remaking God into his own image. That way, man can claim to be a follower of God and still do whatever he wants. (Many of the inhabitants of Hades wore faux haloes)
One example, Jesus told man to do as he does, and modern man, demonically reverses that by asking self-serving things like; “What would Jesus do?” And, we all know that really means–what do I want that would make them think that Jesus wants it too.
This is the kind of information I long for in an annotated Bible.
Can anyone recommend an annotated Bible that carries this kind of information.
Does Verbum do this? Is the Haydock Bible close?
The Ignatius Catholic Study Bible isn’t bad Tito:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaOlFMhrQok
Yes, we use that Ignatius study Bible- it is the New Testament. For the whole thing we use the Didache from Ignatius
And
https://www.agapebiblestudy.com
If it is right that the word ‘religion’ is from the Latin word “ligare” – to bind – that makes me think again of the old song “blessed be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love”. That connecting lig. “ligament” makes it possible for us to have that relationship- kind of structurally helps us. . Also notice that same little part in the word “0b lig agtion
Thanks guys!
I love it when people say they have a personal relationship with the Beloved One – almost as if He is going to ride around with them in a pick-up truck drinking beer. Almighty God gets lost in our limited intellectual concept of the Eternal Creator – He glorified supernatural sacrificial Love – first by joining us in Human form and then by embracing the agony of all sin for all men for all time and then by subjecting himself to being whipped nearly to death like a slave and then nailed up on display on a piece of wood to suffer unto death by asphyxiation. The mortification we must know from these Acts must make us kneel and bow in worship to Our Savior King, Whose Pure Love we are not fit to behold.
Amen, Shawn. Of course, folks who’ve been taught there is no visible, institutional Church haven’t really got any alternative to the “personal relationship”, “me & Jesus” approach. And you’re right, most of us don’t spend nearly enough time contemplating how that pure love was demonstrated, and how unworthy we are. When an “evangelical” friend asks me if I have “a personal relationship with Jesus”, I like to say, “Well, he suffered and died for me, so yeah, that’s pretty personal.”