Sunday, 21Feb2010, 11:51pm.
Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent John 17: 3
Introduction:
I grew up in a Buddhist/ Taoist family, and in my primary school days I had attended Buddhist Sunday School and read many books on Buddhism. I practised chanting and Buddhist meditation. By the time I was in secondary school, I was already a staunch Buddhist. However, one day, in Nov 1975, after watching a Christian film show at a school evangelistic meeting, I decided to believe in God.
During the first few weeks after I first turned to God from Buddhism, I prayed to God as God Almighty. I just called Him "God". I didn't know much about Jesus Christ yet.
Soon after that, I was taught by two very faithful Christian brothers about the Trinity. From then on, and for the next 33 years until October last year, I believed in the Holy Trinity, and prayed to the Lord Jesus Christ as God very often, and sometimes to God the Father in heaven. All those years, to me, it didn't matter who I prayed to, since the doctrine of the Trinity teaches that the Father is God, the Son is God and the Holy Spirit is also God - three distinct persons, united into one substance called the "Godhead"!
During all those 30 over years, my belief in the Trinity had become a basic assumption - a teaching which, on one hand is so mystifying that nobody can understand it, yet on the other had is so sacred that nobody in my church dares to question or reject it.
Occasional contradictions
However, from time to time, I would come across passages in the NT which didn't make sense because they clearly contradicted the doctrine of the Trinity. Whenever I came across such verses in the NT, I would anxiously look for a way to resolve those contradictions - getting answers from Christian books and magazines, or by asking older Christians or by listening to explanations by preachers during Sunday sermons which occasionally touch on those issues e.g.
(a) Jesus referred to God as his God - John 20:17
(b) Only the Father knows the day and hour when Jesus will return. - Matt.24: 35-37
(c) Jesus is called a man in many parts of the NT - 1Tim.2;5, Rom. 5:15-17, Hebrews 10:12
(d) And in the prophecy of Ps.45:6-7, God is the Messiah's God.
(e) In Peter's preaching on the day of Pentecost, Acts 2: 22 - 24 (note especially v36), tells us that Jesus is a man: accredited by God, handed over to the Jews by God's foreknowledge, raised from death by God and made Lord and Christ by God.
A Panacea to the contradictions
Most of the time my anxiety was resolved by the explanation that Jesus was 100% God and also at the same time 100% human (another mystifying belief) - and whenever such verses occur in the NT (there are many more which I can show you later) - they are talking about the "human" part of Jesus, and not the "divine" part of Jesus. Jesus is supposed to be fully divine, he is the second person within the Godhead, he is part of God himself, yet at the same time, he is also fully human.
In other words, he is part of God, who came to this world as a man!
And so for many years I subscribed to this teaching that all these "contradictory" verses in the NT were written by the apostles when they were referring only to the human part of Jesus, i.e. they were referring to Jesus "as a man" - although he is really one of the three persons that make up God. Thus, the phrase "AS A MAN" became the universal answer, the cure all antidote if you like, to my anxiety over the passages which contradict the doctrine of the Trinity.
Over the years, I have become so strong in embracing and upholding the teaching of the trinity that I woul regard any person, or any church or any group that rejects the trinity as a heretic or a cult e.g. an old english friend who has been worshipping in my church for many years one day told me that he agreed with unitarians, and that he didn't believe in the trinity - I asked him why would he want to worship in this church then? I even told my pastor during prayer meeting about his views. He appeared to have left the church soon after that.
An Epiphany - on Easter morning of 2009
Then came April 2009: Easter sunrise service that morning was an unforgettable epiphany for me (from Gr. epiphania meaning "to manifest, to appear", traditionally on Jan 6th to commemorate visit of the three wise men, Christ's baptism, and his first miracle at Cana of turning water into wine), when Acts 10:34 - 43 was read out by the bible reader, my attention was drawn to the words of Peter in his message to the household of Cornelius at Caesarea:
God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power (v38a)
God was with Him (v 38b).
After he was killed, God raised him up on the third day (v 39).
God showed the resurrected Lord Jesus openly to selected witnesses (v 41),
witnesses whom God had chosen,
so that they could even eat and drink with Him.
Finally, God who ordained the Lord to be judge of the living and the dead (v 42).
It was so clear that morning when listening to the passage being read out, that Jesus is not God himself, yet I dared not admit it to myself, much less to other church members around me. I was so touched by these words of the apostle Peter that morning that I went home to post an article on my blog entitled, "
An Act of God".
From that day on, while I still continued to uphold my trinitarian tradition, I made up my mind to pray only to "God the Father" in the name of "the Son", especially when I was leading prayers in groups or during Sunday worship services.
Class Reunion Oct 2009 - a turning point
Then came September 2009 - I received invitations from several old classmates to attend a class reunion - many of whom I've not met for more than 30 years!
I found out from the Internet that one of my long-lost classmates Kwan, is a Pastor of CDC, and subsequently came across his comment posted on a blog page of a monotheistic Christian web-site, introducing P. Eric's book, "
The Only True God - a study in Biblical Monotheism". I was very curious to find out what my old long-lost class mate is getting into. To my delight, I found that the book was available for
on-line reading free of charge.
So, for the subsequent couple of weeks, I read a lot of P. Eric's arguments and reasoning in making his case for Biblical Monotheism, and in pointing out the errors of the doctrine of Trinity. I also surfed through several other monotheistic websites, some of which do not agree entirely with his views. The more I read, the more enlightening and reasonable those writings came across to me, so much so that for several nights in a row, I read until 2 or 3 a.m.!
I began to realise that my first few weeks of praying to One God Almighty 35 years ago, briefly before I was introduced to the doctrine of trinity by my Christian classmates, was the correct way, although initially I had not yet believed in the name of Jesus. So, a few days before we had to travel down to KL to attend our class reunion, I shared my new realisation with my wife, who didn't take long to see my reasoning and agreed that indeed, the trinity is a confusing and fantastic doctrine, and that monotheism is the right belief, upheld by the early Jewish Christians in the NT.
By the time I met Kwan at the class reunion in Hartamas Heights on 31Oct10, I had covered about 400 pages of "
The Only True God" and downloaded and skimmed through various articles from other related websites.
A Pressing Question
At the same time, and almost immediately, a question loomed in my mind
There is the well-known passage in John 20:26-29 where Thomas exclaims to the risen Lord Jesus: "My Lord and my God".
I learned that Thomas, as a Jew, was addressing Jesus as a representative or agent of God himself, a common Jewish practice in OT times, e.g. Jacob addressed the angel at Peniel (Genesis
32:30) as God. We must not ignore the fact that in the very same chapter, just barely 10 verses earlier (v. 17), the resurrected Jesus had told Mary that he was to ascend to "my Father and your Father, my God and your God", while referring to the disciples as "my brothers" clearly distinguishing himself from the Father.
Grace and Peace
Despite having questions that still remain unanswered, from that time on I started praying again to God our Father in heaven as the One and Only God Almighty, the same God whom I believed in, and to whom I prayed initially back in November 1975 when I turned away from Buddhism.
In fact one of the first things I asked from our One True God was to grant me a safe and successful journey to the class reunion in KL and back to Kampar that same night. The LORD God, YeHoVaH, our loving Father in heaven, gave us that night calm weather, quiet traffic, a clear and alert mind and most of all, a deep peace in my heart - a peace that I had not experienced for many years - and we returned home safely after midnight.
Implications of knowing the Truth about the Only True God
Suddenly all the bible passages about Jesus as the Son of God became very clear and easy to comprehend. The anxiety over various contradictions to the teaching of the trinity had thus disappeared.
It was exciting to know that the God of the NT is the same almighty LORD or Adonai YeHoVaH of the OT. Every time I prayed, I was thrilled by the knowledge of the truth that I was praying to the same God that Abraham prayed to. Our Father in heaven is no longer merely one of the three persons of the trinity. He is no longer one-third, 33.33% of God! He IS YeHoVaH, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He IS the God of King David and the prophet Daniel.
No longer did I have to regard YeHoVaH, translated as "the LORD" in our English Bibles (except the Jerusalem Bible) as a somewhat outdated, less informed way of addressing God by the less informed monotheistic Israelites of the OT. And No longer do I have to replace this knowledge of YeHoVaH, the Only True God, with a more modernised, updated version of God comprising three persons. The confusion disappears when I stop worshipping Jesus Christ as one of three persons united into one God.
Instead Jesus, becomes my Example in faith - I shall live just as my Lord had lived his life in this world. He is the author and the finisher of my faith. He sits at the right hand of God. And he intercedes for me.
Other implications - perhaps stronger ones
A less pleasant implication is the likelihood that I will be labelled a heretic, and that my association with monotheistic Christians will be regarded as an association with deviants, if not cults.
The belief in monotheism has long been upheld by cults and deviant groups which consider themselves the only true churches e.g. Jehovah's Witnesses and Herbert Armstrong WCOG
In fact any person, or church or fellowship group that refuses to believe in the trinity is almost always, certainly and immediately, without further reservation, regarded as a cult, or a false church by traditional trinitarian churches.
Ironically, today's protestant churches are considerably more tolerant of a wide range of questionable beliefs and excessive practises from splinter churches and charismatic groups, including even considering Roman Catholics as their brothers, than they would of any unitarian or monotheistic christian church.
This implication is particularly difficult for me and my family - as I have been involved in teaching and preaching in various churches over the past 27 years, particularly the recent 12 years in Kampar, Teluk Intan and quite frequently in Ipoh. Begin with my christian family members, I am now making arrangements to let more and more people around me know of my new awakening.
So then, who is Jesus Christ to us?
All these last five months of serious consideration lead to one question this morning, "So,who is Jesus?". If Jesus is not God the son, who then is the Son of God? Who then is the Anointed One, the Christ, the Messiah?
When we regard our Lord Jesus Christ as the Son of God, our Messiah, we are reminded of at least three things our Lord has done for us:
I Jesus is the Model of our faith
II Jesus is the Mediator of our salvation
III Jesus is the Master of our obedience
I think I'll have time today only to explain the first point: that the Son of God is the Model of our faith:
(1) Firstly, he is the Model for our Empowerment:
Jesus was anointed by the Spirit of God (Acts 10: 38, Luke 3:22). He was led by the Spirit, and he was full of the Spirit (Luke 4:1, 14) - beginning with his ministry in Galilee - after his baptism by John in the Jordan River.
Likewise, beginning with our baptism, we, like our Lord Jesus, also receive the Spirit of God - and like Jesus - we are to be led by the Spirit, and be full of the Spirit. (Rom. 8: 11-14). The same Spirit who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to our bodies, by his indwelling in us - and by this Spirit we are to put to death the deeds of the body - and we who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.
(2) Secondly, he is the Model for our Endurance:
He is the author and finisher of our faith, and we are to "look unto Jesus" (Heb. 12:2, 3) - who endured the cross, despised shame, and endured such hostilities from sinners - let us make him our model, our example - so that we will not become weary or discouraged in our souls.
(3) Thirdly, he is the Model for our Emulation:
In 1Cor. 11: 1 - the apostle Paul asked the Corinthian Christians to imitate him as he imitated Christ. Let us likewise imitate (follow, exemplify, emulate) our Lord Jesus in our lives.
Phil. 2:8 - Christ became obedient to God, to the point of death, even death on the cross . . .
Four verses later, (after explaining how God has highly exalted Christ and gave him the name which is above every name) - the apostle told the Philippians "Therefore" - they must also obey God (as they had always obeyed) - and work out their own salvation with fear and trembling!
Conclusion
Bro. and Sis. in Christ, let us live like our Lord Jesus Christ. Let us make him the model of our faith - in our endurance, in our empowerment, and in our emulation of him Just as Christ humbled himself and obeyed God to the point of crucifixion, let us also obey God like he did - and work out our salvation.
