The biblical autumn festivals are coming up, including the of Festival of Tabernacles. John 7 describes how Jesus went to Jerusalem for the Tabernacles festival, only six months before he was crucified, buried and raised from the dead.

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In reading over John chapter 7, I’m struck by how the question on the people’s minds in Jerusalem at the Festival was not“Is this man God?”. Rather, the question people were asking themselves was “Is this man the Messiah?” For centuries, deity of Christ and Trinitarian theology have claimed that the Gospel of John is the book that presents Jesus as God. But to make that claim a person has to bring his own presuppositions to a few verses in John’s Gospel, while at the same time ignore the many times that John is really presenting Jesus as the Messiah.

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To proclaim “Jesus is God” and that the Gospel of John says so, is to proclaim a different Jesus, a different Messiah than the one the Gospel of John is proclaiming. “Jesus is God” is an anti-messiah claim, a claim that exchanges the real human Christ of the Gospel of John for another. It is a claim that is against the real human Messiah Jesus of the Gospel of John.

As presented in John’s Gospel, and indeed all of the New Testament, those that believe in Jesus do not believe that Jesus is God. Rather, those that believe in Jesus believe that Jesus is the Messiah. “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Messiah has been born of God” (1 John 5:1).

It is a misrepresentation and perversion of Scripture to insist that “everyone who believes that Jesus is God has been born of God”.

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For full texts of this podcast see here:

https://landandbible.blogspot.com/2019/10/in-gospel-of-john-jesus-is-messiah-not.html