December 10, 2007 ©Homer
Kizer
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Commentary — From the Margins
The Only Name
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Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them, “Rulers of the people and elders, if we are being examined today concerning a good deed done to a crippled man, by what means this man was healed, let it be known to all of you and to all people of Israel that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth [Iēsous Christos Nazōraios], whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead—by him this man is standing before you well. This Jesus [This one] is the stone that was rejected by you, the builder, which has become the cornerstone. And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” (Acts 4:8-12)
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When
the rulers of the people and the elders perceived that Peter and John, speaking
in power and authority, were uneducated, common men, they were astonished (Acts
4:13), and they commanded Peter and John “not to or teach at all in the name of
Jesus [Iēsous]” (v. 18).
Nevertheless, Peter and the apostles, filled with the Holy Spirit so that Peter’s
shadow falling upon a person healed the person, continued to obey God [theos] (Acts 5:29). Peter and the apostles were brought
before the council. The “high priest questioned them, saying. ‘We strictly
charged you not to teach in this name, yet you have filled
Within Sabbatarian Christianity is a poisonous dogma that further marginalizes already marginalized disciples: this dogma holds that non-Hebrew speakers must pronounce Jesus’ name in Hebrew, and that disciples must believe that Jesus did not come as the only son (John 3:16) of the Logos, who was Theos and who was with Theon in the beginning (John 1:1-2). This dogma falsely holds that the Logos was not the creator of all that is despite John writing, “All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made” (1:3). The Apostle Paul writes,
He is the image of the invisible God [theos], the firstborn of all creation. For by him all
things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether
thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through
him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold
together. And he is the head of the body, the Church. He is the beginning, the
firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. (
The sacred names dogma absolutely refuses to concede that God can die—and because Jesus died at Calvary, those disciples who have eaten this poisonous herb contend that Jesus cannot be God, but must be a man only, and because Jesus was only a man He cannot be the creator of all that is.
The ignorance of the sacred names faction is profound: time can be written as a mathematical function of gravity, and by extension, mass. Thus, time does not exist outside the creation. Heaven is a “timeless” supra-dimensional realm in which the present moment never changes to the next moment. All activity occurs in the existing moment; therefore, all activity must co-exist with all that has come before and with all that will come after. All entities must function as one entity. All living beings in this timeless dimension must function together as cells function together in a human body.
Because of the limitations that exist within a paradox [two things cannot occupy the same time and space], the presence of life and the absence of life cannot co-exist in any living being in heaven; so that which has life has everlasting life and cannot perish or suffer decay. To have life in heaven is to have everlasting life for the moment lasts forever. However, when a living being leaves heaven and enters into the creation which has been put into subjection to decay, this living being can die and actually must die, for the moment continually changes to the next moment. What has life this moment can lose that life in the next moment. Therefore, while Satan and his angels cannot die as long as they remained in heaven, they will be cast into the creation (Rev 12:7-10) where they can die, and where Satan will die by having fire come out from his belly (Ezek 28:18-19).. So to say that God is immortal in the heavenly realm is true, but when God [Logos] leaves the heavenly realm to enter His creation, He not only can die but He must die for this creation is passing away (1 John 2:17). It will not last forever.
When the Logos left the heavenly realm to be born as the man Jesus (John 1:14), the Logos ceased to exist in that heavenly realm. The Logos did not exist in this earthly realm as Theos. Rather, the Logos existed as His only Son, the human man Jesus of Nazareth. So the Logos who was God and was with God in the beginning was no longer a spirit being like the Father in substance. As a spirit being He ceased to be—He died—the moment He left the heavenly realm to be born as man in this earthly realm.
Disciples who have eaten of that poisonous sacred names herb cannot accept the
above. Most often they are too poorly educated to envision a timeless
dimension, or the movement from outside of time into time. As non-Hebrew
speakers, they will have learned enough Hebrew that they can mispronounce most
any name, and they have so little respect for the Tetragrammaton YHWH that they will assign vowel
pointing to it and attempt to pronounce it, which Jesus never did do—following
the traditions of the elders, Jesus sang Adonai
when He encountered the Tetragrammaton in Scriptures He cited. Matthew
transcribed Adonai as adoni [for a human lord] as kurios when Jesus cited Psalm 110:1 (Matt 22:44). If
Jesus had attempted to pronounce the Tetragrammaton as sacred names disciples do, Matthew would have transcribed some word
beginning with rough breathing on an /I/. Plus, Jesus would have offended the
Pharisees more so than He did, and offended them for the wrong reason. Even
today, no sacred names disciple will
make Jews jealous by attempting to pronounce the Tetragrammaton, and the
Apostle Paul contends that salvation has come to Gentiles to make natural
Salvation only comes through one name: Jesus of Nazareth. It comes through no other. But it will come to the person with a speech impediment, as well as to the person who speaks only English, or only Mandarin Chinese, or only Hindi. It comes acknowledging that the Creator of all that is—however His name is uttered—entered His creation, lived a sinless life, took on the sins of Israel, and died on the cross at Calvary only to be raised from the dead after three days, thereby giving His life as an acceptable sacrifice for the lawlessness of all who will be of that great nation descended from the patriarch Abraham, the father of the faithful. In no other name can it be said that the Creator of all that is died for the person who would be saved. Therefore, in no other name can a person be saved.
Poisoned on locoweed, sacred names disciples will dare go where Jesus never trod, but their folly can be forgiven them: blasphemy against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, but every other sin will be forgiven (Matt 12:32), including blasphemy against the Father and the Son. And it is blasphemy against Christ Jesus that sacred names disciples commit when they deny that He, as the Logos, was the creator of all that is, or that He was not God before He entered His creation as His only son to die as the man Jesus of Nazareth. Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is committed by those who make themselves part of the great falling away when the lawless one is revealed (2 Thess 2:3), for all who have been born of Spirit will then be liberated from indwelling sin and death by being filled with the Holy Spirit, not a personage but the divine Breath of God. If a liberated Israelite returns to sin or takes lawlessness back inside the person, this lawlessness will not be forgiven the person for whom no more sacrifice remains. And those disciples who refuse to recognize Jesus as the Creator of all that is—and there will be many—will be uprooted by the lawless one who will attempt to change times and the law. What happens to them when they are uprooted remains to be seen [is outside of what prophecy addresses], but the suggestion of prophecy is that they will be slain near the beginning of the seven endtime years of tribulation.
Is being slain for one’s belief in Christ a bad thing? No, it is not. But to be slain for not believing in Christ being the Creator of all that is becomes a slaying for denial of Christ, and the disciple who denies Christ will, in turn, be denied by Christ before the Father.
Sacred names disciples play a very deadly game with Christ, a game in which they bet their salvation against what apostles John and Paul wrote; for “‘as the Father raises the dead and gives them life’” (John 5:21), Christ Jesus “‘gives life to whom he will’” (same verse). The Son gives life by causing the mortal flesh to put on immortality, the perishable to put on imperishability. And the disciple who denies that the Son is also “God” [an English linguistic icon that was despised by Latin theologians for cause] denies the only one to whom all judgment has been given, and the only who will give to the disciple an immortal body.
Christology debates caused great division within the 4th-Century CE Church, which was already dead by then—and Christological debates at this time reveal just how dead the Body remains.
Either John is a liar when he records the following words spoken by Jesus, what sacred names disciples bet, or Jesus was God before He was born as His only Son:
I [Jesus] speak of what I have seen with my Father, and you [Pharisees] do what you have heard from your father. (John 8:38)
If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing what Abraham did, but you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. (John 8:39-40)
If God [Theos] were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and I am here. I came not of my own accord, but he sent me. Why do you not understand what I say? Is it because you cannot bear to hear my word. [sic] You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. … Whoever is of God hears the words of God. The reason why you do not hear them is that you are not of God. (John 8:42-44, 47)
The “Pharisees” were puritans: they sought to worship God in purity, as do sacred names disciples. But Jesus said that they were of the devil. By extension, this must be said of disciples who refuse to believe that Jesus came from God as He claimed; this must be said of disciples who cannot bear to hear Jesus’ words about coming from the Father; this must be said about all who deny that Jesus, as the Logos, created all that is.
The case against sacred names disciples is simple: since they will not believe that Jesus was God before He came as the only Son of Theos, nor will they believe that He is the Creator of all that is, they deny Christ today and they will be denied by Christ when their judgments are revealed. Why? Because their Father is not the Most High God but the devil—they are tares that focus on the audibly heard sound by which they identify themselves one to another rather than on the kingdom of God, which comes when the glorified Christ returns with a name which no man knows (Rev 19:12). So it matters not how the name of Jesus is pronounced today, for this name will not be His name when He returns. Every tongue will have to pronounce a name that it has never uttered, for the names of this world belong to this world which is passing away.
As an aside, the controversy about the use of “J” is a non-issue for Jesus’ name written as the angel Gabriel gave the name to Mary is 'Iēsous … English iconography does not use the first two of these Greek characters. The rough breathing on the /I/ as indicated by the Greek character /'/ [apostrophe] would have been, before the English vowel shift, quite accurately captured in the sound assigned to the /J/ when this character made its debut 500 or so years ago.
The tragedy that will befall sacred names disciples when the seven endtime years begin would be avoidable—the man of perdition will show them no mercy—if these disciples had not made an idol of their tongues and how they pronounce a name that should never be pronounced. Even the Pharisees of Jesus’ day knew better than to render the Tetragrammaton YHWH into visible sound, an oxymoron that accurately describes written words consisting of vowels and consonants. The Tetragrammaton is not a word, for no word can adequately describe God. And in English, that which cannot be described by a word is grotesque … God is not grotesque, but if a person ever wondered why gargoyles are on cathedrals, the person has his or her answer: gargoyles are grotesques.
God cannot be described by a word in a human language, Hebrew included [the reason why the Tetragrammaton was too sacred to be pronounced], for in the beginning He was two who functioned as One as if married. Today, He is two who functions as One as if Father and Son. And though the concept of two being One troubles English speakers, the concept should not be all that troubling when a person realizes that “One” represents first “unity,” not singularity. And it is in the sense of one being unity that Jesus prayed,
And for their sake [Jesus’ first disciples] I consecrate myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth. I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one. I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. (John 17:19-23)
Jesus as the Logos was one with the Father, and He is now one with the Father, and the destinies of disciples are to be one with the Father and the Son. If a disciple is not one with Jesus in this world, how does that disciple expect to be one with Him in heaven? And the disciple who denies that Jesus was God before He came as His only Son is not one today with Jesus.
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"Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved."