Who Jesus Is Not Series

6. Who is Jesus according to Albany Park Religionists?

Here are some other revelations about Jesus, taught by people in this very neighborhood. Strange things have been added to the record since the record first was published by God's men, the prophets and apostles, starting in the centuries before Jesus.

Now, if you believe in the living Jesus, the resurrected Jesus, He will give you His very Spirit, and that Spirit will tell you what is true and what is false.

The Bible says that he who believes in the Son of God has the "witness" or the "record" in himself! If you have the Son inside of you, you have life. If you do not have the Son of God, you do not have life.

So get in touch with this Jesus who now lives in you, if you have asked for His forgiveness, as you listen to these other ideas. You'll know immediately, as I do, that they are not God's ideas, but either men's or the Enemy's.

Idea 1: 600 years after Jesus, a man arose in the Middle East and claimed that God had given him a new revelation about the Son of God. In this new revelation, Jesus did not die on the cross. Obviously if He did not die on the cross, He did not rise from the dead.

The Bible says that if Jesus did not rise from the dead, you are still in your sins. We need a Savior who is willing to die, but able to be raised from death. That's the Savior we have!

But in that one teaching by this prophet of the 7th century, the entire Christian faith was shot down. For if Jesus did not die and is not raised, the world must remain in its sin before a Holy God, with no way to pay that debt.

Sin is an awful thing. And that religion formed around that prophet offers no way to overcome sin. No way to be saved except maybe if we try hard enough, maybe by chance this stern god of theirs will say, "All right, come on in." But only maybe. And only if you're one of them.

We say clearly to them today, Jesus is God the Son. The God of Heaven is a Father. He not only has a Son named Jesus, He has millions of adopted children who have been united to Jesus by faith, and fully accepted forever.

And we say to them, Our faith is not a "maybe" thing at all! This Jesus came into the world to save sinners by dying on a Roman cross. His mission was accomplished fully when three days later God raised His Son from the grave!

He's alive today, and He will save you today, if you let Him. He alone has been given the power to take away your sin.

Idea 2. In the 1820's, 1200 years after "Gabriel" appeared to the man in the Middle East, another "angel" appeared to a man here in the United States. Through a long complicated process of revelations, a long complicated understanding of who Jesus is evolved.

Yet if you ask these people today what they believe, their answers sound deceptively like those of the Christian Church. For example, they believe in the Father, the Son , and the Holy Ghost.

But they do not believe in a Trinity.

They believe that God and Jesus were separate physical people who lived on the earth. God was Jesus' father, and both men died.

Jesus is to them the literal Son of God and God's wife, begotten in pre-existent times. Jesus is to them the brother of Lucifer and all spirits. He is one of three separate gods, and the first one to receive a spirit body.

A very confusing Jesus, and a very powerless Jesus. Why powerless? Because in this religion, what Jesus did on the cross is not enough. You will only be saved if you are obedient to all the laws. That sounds like Moses, not Jesus. In Jesus, the real Jesus, we are saved by faith, and works follow.

In their religion, and most religions of the world, you are saved by trying real hard, and if you don't try hard enough, you don't make it. Very insecure faith.

The reason this religion is so confusing is because it has a different source of authority. They believe the Bible to be the Word of God only where it was translated correctly! And they decide where it is translated correctly. They also have another set of books that they believe are of equal value.

That problem of authority is the same in all three of these Albany Park religions, and in the church of Rome and the Orthodox church, also represented in our neighborhood. They all claim to believe the Bible... up to a point. But they have these other books, too.