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Thirty yeas ago this June while attending summer church camp as young teen, I sat in the open-air tabernacle listening to the evening evangelist give a dynamic and passionate sermon about Jesus’ 2nd coming.  The words he spoke, the Scripture verses he read aloud, the entire tone of his message struck a chord in my inner being.  In fact his sermons each previous night of the week-long camp were just as good and weighed heavily in my mind progressively.  But this final sermon of the week - on the final night of camp, seemed like God Himself was speaking through this man to give that particular sermon to ME.  At the alter call at the end of that service this minister asked if anyone else there in attendance wanted to accept Christ as their Lord & Savior (many had the previous nights & were also baptized).  A warmness overtook me and though at first my feet felt like they were nailed to the ground, the moment I decided I had to walk towards the front of the tabernacle, I could have sworn I floated like a feather down the aisle and up the front.  With tears in my eyes I knelt and confessed with my words and every emotional fiber within me, that I believed in and accepted Jesus of Nazareth as my Savior.  The next day before camp broke up, I was baptized in the same stream that my own grandmother had been baptized in some 50 years before.

Many of us here at Kingdomready have talked about “Agency” in Scripture before and how much it is a part of the Hebrew thought world & the culture of the biblical writers. A “shaliach” or agent/emissary represented someone and was treated as that individual because legally they were.  In our modern society, the closest we get to that is to appoint “Power of Attorney” to someone.  They can make legally binding decisions for us because we have designated them to serve in that capacity for us.  But in ancient Hebrew culture, the shaliach (or sheliah) wasn’t just that person in a legal sense only.  They were also respected, treated, and thought of AS THE ONE THEY REPRESENTED.  Back in 2005 a man by the name of David Burge of New Zealand wrote a terrific article about how much this Hebrew ”law of agency” plays out in God’s dealing with man throughout Scripture and how vital it is to understand the concept in order to prevent a host of biblical errors.  Here’s the article in its entirety.  It is long, but extremely well done!

Over the holidays I was at my father-in-law’s house and we were talking about the new “one God” books that had just been released. As we spoke it became clear that it was hard to keep them all straight (since there are now so many). As a result of this conversation I decided to put together a list of books that specifically address the idea of Christian monotheism. Perhaps this post will be of help to those looking to research this topic in the future. Let me know if I missed any. (These books are ordered alphabetically by the author’s last name)

Who Is Jesus? A Plea for a Return to Belief in Jesus the Messiah
by Sir Anthony Buzzard
paperback booklet, 40 pages
1986: Restoration Fellowship

Interpretation #1:
From eternity past the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit existed as a community of one, perfect in love, harmony, and joy. In the enternal counsels of this triune God the plan of salvation for the yet-to-be-created human race was decreed. The only question was who would go. Overwhelmed with self-sacrificial love, the Son volunteered to humble himself by uniting humanity to his divinity, veiling his deity by taking on human flesh. Two thousand years ago, this salvation plan was carried out by the second person of the Trinity. He entered the virgin womb of Mary and suddenly she became pregnant with God the Son. He was perfect God and perfect man, not half divine and half human like Hercules, but fully God and fully man in a totally unique way. This incredible event is called the incarnation—the moment when God became man for our salvation. In fact, the cross is not really the most important event for redemption, the incarnation is. For without the humbling act of God giving up his divine prerogatives to condescend to the lowly state of a first century Palestinian Jew, the cross would mean nothing. Thus, in the grand scheme of things, the incarnation is the premier event that brought God to man so that man could be reconciled with God.

I ran across this paper on Adam Pastor’s web site “Adoni Messiah“.  And it has a connection back to kingdomready in that the author of the paper was a presenter at the 2005 & 2006 One God Conferences that our own Sean Finnegan also attended.  Small world indeed. Speaking of which, Sean has the audio of the author presenting this very paper on the Christian Monotheism site at this link.

Jesus Christ was the God of the Old Testament. He was the Creator, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He became a man and died for His creation to redeem it. To be the savior, he HAD to be God. If he had not been God, then His sacrifice would not have been sufficient to redeem mankind. If he was merely a man, then the fact that he led a perfect life would only be sufficient for him to save himself. In order to save mankind, he had to pre-exist his human existence as the Creator God.

Last month on both Saturday 6/13 and Sunday 6/14, I attended the 2009 One God Seminars put on by the ACD (Association for Christian Development).  This was the first such conference I went to in person though I’ve read a lot about previous years conferences from this site (Sean has attended many), Anthony Buzzard’s Restoration Fellowship website & monthly newsletter (Focus on the Kingdom), and even the ACD Seminar organizer – Ken Westby’s website: http://www.godward.org/. I’ve always wanted to attend one, but for one reason or another never was never able to make the journey to the host location.  However this year’s chosen location happened to be in my home turf of Dallas-Ft. Worth.  And even more convenient was that the actual meeting location was a whole 15-20 minute drive from my house. What could be more perfect?  I was very ecstatic about it and even more so when I learned that Sir Anthony Buzzard was going to be a presenter. I had always wanted to hear him speak in person and to have the chance to meet him and possibly have a discussion or two on our mutual biblical interests.

A new player on the biblical unitarian field is a man who calls himself “Servetus the Evangelical.” Michael Servetus, was the incredibly brilliant medical doctor who discovered pulmonary circulation and the remarkably talented theologian who wrote De Trinitatis Erroribus (On the Errors of the Trinity) in 1531 and Christianismi Restitutio (The Restoration of Christianity) in 1553. He was immediately banished from Spain after his first book was published and he changed his name from Miguel Serveto to Michel de Villeneuve. After a time he began correspondence with the famous French reformer John Calvin who was running Geneva, Switzerland as his own utopian project. Calvin sent Servetus his famous Institutes of the Christian Religion, which Servetus promptly read and filled its margins with annotations and corrections before sending it back to Calvin. Naturally, Calvin was enraged and actually cooperated with the Catholic authorities (whom he despised) to get Servetus arrested. Fortunately, Servetus successfully escaped but then found himself on the run.

I recently received this email from a pastor in Malaysia:

I m Pastor Ng from the Christian Disciples Church, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. We are a small independent evengelical church which had recently ( a year ago) changed our stand from trinitarianism to biblical monotheism just as you have stated in your statement of faith.

I started questioning trinity despite having taught it for close to 15 years, when my teacher and the founder of our church Pastor Eric Chang received this new revelation about the truth on the only true God and taught it to us about a year ago. Right now I have no doubts that there is only one God Yahweh and one Lord Jesus Christ.

by Dr. Joe Martin, Academic Dean of Atlanta Bible College

I confess. I had to look up “ineluctable” when I first read it in an article about Yahweh. It means “not to be avoided, resisted or changed.” Well, if that’s the case, I’m a little “ticked,” perturbed, bothered. We’re losing God’s identity, my Abba, my Father by hiding him with another tradition. In a letter from the “Congregation for Divine Worship,” dated June 29, 2008 and signed by Cardinal Francis Arinze and Archbishop Malcom Ranjith, the Vatican no longer wants the name of God, Yahweh used in liturgy, that is songs, preaching, or other parts of formal service. As Charlie Brown would say, “Good grief, whose idea was that!”

Here’s the second part of the four part booklet (technically the second half of Part I - with the two halves of Part II to come) - The Two Adams, by Homer D. Baxter.

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“And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed” (Gen. 2:8).

This garden eastward in Eden signifies the first usages of the word Eden referred to the earth. The garden was but a small portion of Eden, into which God placed Adam to begin his duties and responsibilities, which consisted mostly of “to dress and keep” it.