Hello everyone.
My last video has turned out to be one of my most controversial. It asked the question: “Does Jesus Want Us to Pray to Him?” Based on Scripture, I concluded that the answer to that question was a resounding “No”! But a lot of people were very upset by that conclusion. They felt that I had been arbitrary and divisive by saying that it was wrong to pray to Jesus. They criticized the tone of that video, claiming it was “dismissive and flippant towards those with opposing views and was reminiscent of Watchtower behaviour”. They feared that I might be “alienating fellow believers who sincerely want to pray to Jesus” and that I was “undermining the Biblical emphasis on unity and inclusivity.”
“Unity and inclusivity.” Now there’s a bit of Watchtower reasoning for you.
You know, I’ve found that when you are accused of something, often the people making the accusation are doing the very thing they are accusing you of doing. It’s call “projection” and we see it all the time.
For instance, that last video, “Does Jesus Want Us to Pray to Him?”, was born out of a need to resolve a dispute in a couple of our foreign language online Bible study groups. Some were insisting on praying to Jesus on behalf of the group even though they knew it was upsetting to the majority present in the meeting. Of course, those insisting on praying to Jesus could have simply prayed to our heavenly Father while in the group and avoided being divisive. No one was stopping them from praying to Jesus on their own time, but “Nooo,” they had to insist on imposing their views on the group and causing a lot of hurt feelings and sleepless nights.
From the correspondence I’ve been getting through comments, emails, and messages, insisting on praying to Jesus is a very emotional issue. It seems I’ve really touched a nerve by explaining what the Bible says about prayer, how it applies only to God.
Typical of this sentiment are these words from a brother I’ve known for years:
“It all began one night when I was reading Revelation chapters 4 and 5 when I realised that I never had said "thank you" to Jesus for having died in my place. So that very night, still as a JW, for the first time in my life, I kneeled to Jesus and I accepted Him as my Saviour and King. From that moment my life began to change and alone I learned that I was a child of God, that I needed to partake at the Memorial and so on. For me everything changed when I prayed to Jesus!”
Now, it’s not my desire to rain on anyone’s parade, but is how something makes you feel the basis for establishing what is right and what is wrong? We’ve all heard people justify a particular lifestyle by saying, “How could something that feels so right be wrong?”
Am I saying we shouldn’t feel good when we do what is biblically right? Of course not! Emotion plays a role in our worship. What I’m saying is that you cannot justify a course of action based only on how it makes you feel. If you do, then you’re making your feelings, your wants, your desires the measure of right and wrong. But shouldn’t we leave that to God to tell us what is right and wrong?
But let’s take another reasoning look at the issue of praying to Jesus and ask another logical question. Here’s an important question: Since the Bible tells us to pray to God, our Father in heaven, but never tells us to pray to anyone else, including Jesus, why do people fight so hard to justify praying to Jesus, even to the point of causing division within their own Christian groups? What spirit is motivating such ones to promote praying to Jesus?
One of the arguments that promoters of “prayer to Jesus” use is that prayer is just a form of communication. So, what’s the big deal? They’ll point to Stephen who had a vision when he was being stoned to death in which he saw Jesus standing at the right hand of God and called out to him. These people will ask, “Aren’t we allowed to talk with our brother, the Lord Jesus, as we’d talk to anyone else? Is prayer not simply a form of communication?”
Well, that’s a valid question, and to answer it properly, we should start with the definition of prayer.
Dictionary.com defines prayer as
- a devout petition to God
- a spiritual communion with God
- the act or practice of praying to God
So, what distinguishes prayer from any other form of communication is that it is made to God. This would mean that if we want to pray to Jesus, we are treating him as God. Guess what? That is exactly what the promoters of prayer to Jesus are doing. That is not me talking. Oh no. That is what they themselves have written.
For instance, one exJW who was disturbing a Christian gathering with his insistence on prayer to Jesus wrote me this:
“The topic of prayer is a difficult topic, it concerns individual contact with God, it concerns our spirituality. Prayer is a conversation with God and a form of worship, adoration, request and thanksgiving. If a Christian does not believe that Jesus is now God, he will not have the courage to talk to Jesus and approach him in prayer.”
Another former Jehovah’s Witness, the one whose emotional appeal we read earlier, responded to me writing:
“I don't teach that Jesus and God are the same persons. I don't teach that there is a third person of God. It's not me but the Bible that calls Jesus “God” in various places.”
Actually, Jesus isn’t called God in various places, but that’s not the point here. This exJW, while denying belief in the Trinity, and even distinguishing between Jesus and God, continues in the same breath to call Jesus “God”.
A third person just wrote to me saying, “jehovah made jesus my god.” (This fellow always writes in lower case.) I am not sure why.
A fourth correspondent, after accusing me of being like the Watch Tower, wrote:
“Without following men, and by study of the scriptures alone and with the help of the Holy Spirit, it becomes obvious that Jesus is most definitely God.”
Funny, I don’t follow men, like those who promote the Trinity, and I study the Scriptures alone, and I like to think that the Holy Spirit is also helping me, but I’ve come to the very opposite conclusion as this fellow.
Prayer is communication with God. All the things I might say in prayer I can also say to any man. I can talk to a man, beg a man for help, plead with him, praise him, thank him…you get the picture. But speaking any or all of those things to God is different. Communication with God is prayer. That’s the distinction. So, to justify praying to Jesus, I have to make him into God and that is exactly what these people are doing. They are not simply trying to promote prayer to Jesus. They are trying to promote Jesus to Godhood.
And just where will that take them?
We can get one answer from history. In 325 C.E. at the council of Nicaea and with the support of the pagan Roman Emperor, Constantine, Christian leaders enshrined the divinity of Christ by invoking the term homoousios (Greek: “of one substance”) in an official statement of faith known as the Creed of Nicaea. So here Jesus was elevated to Godhood based on the belief that he was made of the same stuff as God. More on that later.
It would be another half century before the Trinity was established by the council of Constantinople in 381 C.E. when the Holy Spirit was added to the mix.
All the twisted scriptural arguments used to justify the Creed of Nicaea are now being used by the people who are making Jesus into God so that they can justify praying to him. That’s worrisome, isn’t it?
The main question that comes to my mind, and maybe yours as well, is why are these people trying so hard to justify something that isn’t scriptural?
That Jesus is not God is very clearly stated over and over in New Testament writings. We can start with the words of Jesus himself. When he was resurrected, he said to Mary Magdelene, “Stop clinging to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father and to my God and your God.’” (John 20:17)
If he was God, Jesus sure missed a great opportunity to tell his disciples that. He could have said, “Stop clinging to me, woman. Don’t you know that I am now God! Go tell everybody this truth!”
If indeed Jesus is God, the apostle Paul missed a similar opportunity to reveal that to us when he wrote these words:
“There is no God but one.” For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords”), yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.” (1 Corinthians 8:4b-6 NIV)
The evidence in Scripture that there is one God, the Father, is overwhelming. The distinction between God and Jesus is everywhere. Here are just three of many, many examples:
“Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort” (2 Corinthians 1:2, 3 NIV)
“All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ. Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes. God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ.” (Ephesians 1:3-5 NLT)
“This letter is from Paul, an apostle. I was not appointed by any group of people or any human authority, but by Jesus Christ himself and by God the Father, who raised Jesus from the dead. May God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ give you grace and peace.” (Galatians 1:1, 3 NLT)
All the scriptures used to justify the claim that Jesus is God are either badly translated or ambiguous. An ambiguous verse is the breeding ground for eisegesis. Remember, eisegesis is where you interpret a verse based on your agenda. But when you love the Bible and the truth it contains, are being trained to think critically, then you reason exegetically. Exegesis is where we let the Bible explain itself. Using exegesis, we don’t cherry-pick verses, but instead, we weave every verse into the full tapestry of Scripture so that everything harmonizes and there are no contradictions. Let me give you one example comparing these two methods, eisegesis and exegesis, to show how this works.
Using eisegesis, if I want to teach that Jesus is God, like those promoting prayer to Jesus do, I’ll quote John 1:1 using a translation like the NIV, the New International Version.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1 NIV)
And in the spirit of eisegesis, I’ll stop right there, because that translation supports my agenda, that Jesus is God. I won’t look further. I won’t try to explain how this verse seems to contradict other parts of the Bible. No, no, no. That isn’t how eisegesis works. And I most certainly won’t go on the Internet to research anything about this verse that might contradict my precious interpretation. If I did that, I might come across this document that lists over a hundred Bible translations dating back to before the Council of Nicaea rendering John 1:1 as, among other phrases, “the word was a god”. (I’ll put a link to that research in the description field of this video.)
But we now reason exegetically, meaning we apply our critical thinking and find the answer that harmonizes with everything taught in Scripture. For example, we can see that the NIV rendering of John 1:1 is wrong because it doesn’t harmonize with Matthew 28:18 which reads: “Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” (NIV)
This is where critical thinking comes into play. You see, if the NIV rendering of John 1:1 is accurate, then Jesus was God in the beginning. So, that means he always had all authority as God from before the beginning of time. So how could he say after his resurrection that “All authority had been given to him”? If Jesus has already been God since the beginning of time, then God gave God all authority, because God didn’t have all authority up to that point. It’s gobbledygook! Why are the Jesus-is-God people willing to swallow such utter nonsense?
Another important premise for the Jesus-is-God people goes back to the Council of Nicaea and that is that they share the same nature or are of the same substance. This is a false and very stupid premise.
This is where human hubris, extreme pride, leads. God Almighty, the creator of all matter, the maker of every element, every substance has himself a substance? God is made of something? The term nature refers to that which is natural, that which has been created. It refers to the physical creation.
If God is made of any substance, doesn’t that make God subject to what he’s made of? And if that is the case, who made the substance from which God is made? This is a very limited and fleshly way of looking at God.
We cannot understand anything about God other than what he has told us in terms we limited humans can understand. The Bible uses anthropomorphic language to help us relate to things which are way above us. We cannot understand God materially or for that matter, even spiritually. We use terms like substance and nature, but those simply cannot apply. God is outside of everything we know as physical beings. Of course, the term used to describe Him in the Bible is “spirit”, but that term means breath, in Greek. God is breath. What God is doing with that word is giving us something we can grasp within our limited human capacity. Breath is something we can feel but cannot see.
If you want to understand God, don’t think physically. Instead, go with what He inspired the final Bible writer to record.
“But anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” (1 John 4:8 NLT)
John tells us that God is love. So, when God made the angels, he made them in his image, but not of his stuff, because God doesn’t have stuff that he’s made of. And when he fashioned humans of the common elements found in the ground, and made us of flesh and blood, he made us in his image, but again not his stuff, because He is not flesh and blood. (Genesis 1:26)
God is love, and so the angels made in his image reflect the divine quality of love, and so likewise you and I are made in his image and can show love.
I could go into all the scriptures that the promoters of Jesus-is-God use to justify their teaching, but you have the Internet. You can look them up for yourself and do your own research.
This brings us to the final question of why do people who have freed themselves from enslavement to men, such as ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses, fall prey again to enslavement to people with their own religious beliefs and ideas?
People always have a reason for what they do but is it a good reason or a bad one.
In the first century, there was a group of Christians that we now know as Judaizers. They were Christians who tried to convince their gentile brothers to get circumcised, because they feared persecution from their countrymen, the Jews who opposed Christianity. What’s interesting is that the question of circumcision was resolved by the congregation in Jerusalem which included the apostles appointed directly by Christ. You can’t have a better endorsement than that. Additionally, the apostles performed miracles, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit were only imparted through the laying on of hands by the apostles.
So, with that level of authority, you’d think that the word of the apostles would be final, yet this did not deter the Judaizers from continuing to spread their poisonous teaching that gentile Christians should be circumcised. Those Judaizers were allowing fear of persecution and the desire to be accepted by the larger community to motivate them into spreading a false teaching to undermine the faith of Christ’s disciples. Of course, we know that they were seeking disciples of their own by forcing them to leave the teachings of Christ. Galatians 6:13 shows us that.
They were introducing one small thing, circumcision, but that was the thin edge of the wedge toward their ultimate goal which was full integration into the law code of Moses.
Similarly, fear of persecution and of being different is motivating some to promote praying to Jesus. It may seem like a small thing, but as we’ve seen it leads to making Jesus into the God you worship. Before too long, you’ll become part of just another evangelical/mainstream/trinitarian/broad-road-to-perdition religious sect. You will end up following men, just like before.
If the authority of Christ’s apostles couldn’t deter the first-century Judaizers, all the reasoning in the world, all the authority of Scripture, will do nothing to deter people today from pushing the idea that Jesus is God to those being gathered together as the children of God. (Matthew 24:31; John 11:52)
Now, it can be very daunting to deal with brothers and sisters you’ve trusted and come to love, when they turn on you with false teachings. But this is nothing new.
People who promote unity and harmony at the expense of integrity and truth are not doing you any favors. That is what the leaders of the Watchtower do, not to mention the leaders of other religions.
Those who call Jesus God will find out that he doesn’t know them as he himself warned at Matthew 7:21-23. And why won’t he know them? Because they did not build their faith on his foundation, but on their own.
“Why do you keep on saying that I am your Lord, when you refuse to do what I say? Anyone who comes and listens to me and obeys me is like someone who dug down deep and built a house on solid rock. When a flood came and the river rushed against the house, it was built so well that it didn't even shake. But anyone who hears what I say and doesn't obey me is like someone whose house wasn't built on solid rock. As soon as the river rushed against that house, it was smashed to pieces!” (Luke 6:46-49 CEV)
Ponder Jesus’ words for a moment. Are you listening to him and obeying him? The question from the previous video is, “Does Jesus want us to pray to him?” Well, does he? Does he tell you to pray to him? No, but he does tell you to pray to God as your Father. Are you listening? God, our heavenly Father has told you to listen to Jesus. “This is my son, the beloved. Listen to him.” (Mark 9:7)
God calls Jesus his Son, so why are you making Jesus into God?
Thank you for your time and your support.