Quote# 138713
Ignoring the insane amount of misinformation that atheists and agnostics spread whenever these questions are asked (I don’t know why people who don’t believe in Christianity spend so much time trying to disprove it), Jesus did fulfill every prophecy written about him, he just didn’t do it in the way people expected him. But people without the spirit of God will never understand how God thinks, and therefore will always be relegated to dismiss anything that isn’t literal or physical.
“The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of man except his own spirit within him? So too, no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. We have not received the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us. And this is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom, but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words.
The natural man does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God. For they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual man judges all things, but he himself is not subject to anyone’s judgment. “For who has known the mind of the Lord, so as to instruct Him?” But we have the mind of Christ.” - 2 Cor. 2:11
People who refuse to let God be God except by conformity to their physical senses, will never understand what the Bible is actually saying. So they will always see contradictions and lies because they’ve chosen to reject the only means by which we can see anything else.
The clearest example I saw of this misinformation in another person’s post was the claim that Jesus missed building the third temple. Like the blind, unspiritual religious leaders of Jesus’ day, people who claims like this are unable to think outside of the what they can see and touch, so if there’s not an physical building, a literal temple built, they just write it off as another religious lie.
On the contrary, Jesus said in John 2,
“Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up again.”
And just like these religious critics that are clueless about spirituality, and having no relationship with the Spirit are ignorant of how God was working through Jesus, the leaders snapped back at Jesus with what? An objection based on a physical temple.
“This temple took forty-six years to build,” the Jews replied, “and You are going to raise it up in three days?”
But what does it say next? Verse 25,
“But Jesus was speaking about the temple of His body.”
Christ himself is the third and final temple. Further, in Christ, we too become that temple of God.
“Don't you realize that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God? You do not belong to yourself,” - 1 Cor. 6:19
Jesus did rebuild the third temple, and he made it out of humanity itself, instead of building yet another out of dead rocks.
Next this critic in another answer says that Jesus failed to gather all the Jews back to the land of Israel.
Jesus said in John 12:32, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”
The Apostle Paul says over and over in his writings that there’s no longer a distinction between Jew and Gentile (non-Jew), but that now we are all one in Christ.
In his letter to the Galatians, Paul says that “Jews” are not “Jews” because they are physical descendants of Abraham, but “true Jews” (or “true children of Abraham”) and “true Israel” are all those who are justified just as Abraham was, “by faith.”
Are you seeing the pattern?
It’s not about the physical, literal definitions of fulfillment we’ve come to accept and expect by our standards, and it’s not knowable in the ignorance we try to pass of as intelligence. It’s why it comes off as foolish to all the self-proclaimed intellects, but becomes the wisdom of God for all the losers of the world that can admit they’ve been hopelessly ignorant all along.
Are you seeing the other pattern?
Jesus is the third temple…
…annnnnd..
Jesus is the “land of Israel.”
Jesus is the one who has done it all. He does the fulfilling, he does the drawing, he does the saving, he does the justifying. He is the “author and the finisher,” “the beginning and the end,” the “alpha (first) and the omega (last),” and everything in between.
“The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in Him all things were created, things 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.
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 and firstborn from among the dead, so that in all things He may have preeminence. For God was pleased to have all His fullness dwell in Him, and through Him to reconcile to Himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through the blood of His cross.
Once you were alienated from God and were hostile in your minds because of your evil deeds. But now He has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy, unblemished, and blameless in His presence— if indeed you continue in your faith, established and firm, not moved from the hope of the gospel you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become a servant.” - Col. 1:15
All a human has to do is say “yes” instead of no. They don’t even have to get rid of any baggage, they just have to loosen their grip on it enough for him to.
The only thing Jesus doesn’t do is the judging and condemning. People do that in their demand to be judged by anything other than the work of Jesus that “takes away the sin of the world.” Want to keep and be judged according to your record of good works and so-called intellect? Well, in your file of good deeds (and I bet they are many!) there is also a record of bad deeds. And in your file of witty intellect (you smart all-knowing somebody!), there is also a boatload of ignorance. If you demand to be judged by the good, you demand to be judged by the bad. And contrary to what we think of ourselves, the record of our bad deeds sticks against us harder than the good, because even much of our so-called good is twisted by impure motives.
“Yes, I robbed the liquor store, judge, but I also held the door for a lady on the way out!”
Good luck!
On the other hand, if you give up your insistence to be accepted and noticed based on your own goodness, if you let the record of your good be thrown into the fire, with it goes your record of your bad. If you choose God’s goodness over your own then there isn’t a single stroke of the pen to stand against you because, like Jesus did long ago, you’ve finally considered every record (the good and bad) as dead as he became on the cross. A dead man is good for nothing, and so is your record of deeds.
“He forgave us all our trespasses, having canceled the debt ascribed to us in the decrees that stood against us. He took it away, nailing it to the cross!” Col. 2:14
This is how he draws all people to himself, by the forgiveness of sins; the letting go of people’s offenses; the burning of the record books.
People judge and condemn themselves by the insistence that they be judged according to their records of good, instead of God’s absence of records altogether. Those are people who love their records so much they’d dive into a burning fire for all eternity just to salvage a few scraps.
His one and only requirement is faith. And that doesn’t mean to pound your chest, squint your eyes, and concentrate really hard on believing. Faith is a yes or no question: yes, for Jesus to be the all-doer he already is. Or no, to continue insisting that you yourself fulfill all the requirements he already did (hint: you stand a snowball’s chance in hell).
Back to it. In his drawing all people to himself through the forgiveness of sins, and in his one and only simple requirement being that a person has faith, he is fulfilling the prophecy of gathering all the Jews (children of Abraham being those who have faith) back to the land of Israel (himself).
“That’s cheating! That’s a stretch!”
No. He is “the lamb that was slain before the foundation of the world.”
This was the plan all along. It was people who assumed (and therefore demanded) that it be done according to their limited standards and expectations. No imagination, no willingness to have fun and play, just like the the by-the-book, by-the-letter party-poopers that killed him. :P
“You’re supposed to rebuild a physical temple!”
“I did. It’s me, in the flesh! Oh? You assumed I meant another building made out of bricks and mud and gold? I had something way more beautiful in mind!”
“Well, you said you would gather all the children of Abraham back to Israel!”
“Did that, too! I’m Israel, and the children of Abraham is anyone who believes. Oh? You thought I meant only Jews by nationality? Jews by religion? Oh no, my friend! You’re thinking too small again! I didn’t want a reason to exclude anyone, like you sticklers are always trying to do to each other, so I made it easy for anybody to get in. All you gotta do is check “yes” on the dinner reservation! Faith is nothing more than a RSVP to the party I’m throwing! Say yes and I’ll even pick you up personally!”
Look how it works though: when he refused to do it their way, what did they do? They killed him. And when he continued to refuse to do it their way, what did they do? They jumped on Quora and started spreading a bunch of misinformation based on their own lack of understanding of what the Bible actually says about him. :P
But regardless of the lies people perpetuate, Jesus has very much kept with the program he set in motion from the very beginning, fulfilling each and every prophecy (I’m not going to detail all 300 of them on Quora, but that might be a fun idea for a new book!). He just decided to have a little fun and be creative like creators do, and people decided to do what they do whenever someone colors outside the lines.
“You can’t do that!”
“Actually, it’s my creation, I can do it any way I want. Don’t like it? There’s a nice corner of outer darkness for you to throw your tantrum in. But you certainly aren’t going to ruin my party by throwing your temper tantrum in front of my guests.”
If your life’s mission is to poop on parties and discredit anything and everything with even the slightest association to religion, then you’ve already decided that Jesus didn’t fulfill a single prophecy, and maybe even that there’s no proof that he existed at all. That’s not because the evidence is missing, it’s because you’re missing the evidence.
Daniel Silva,
Quora 3 Comments [7/11/2018 7:48:10 AM]
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