Some of you have seen John Hagee’s video advertising one of his books. In it he makes the startling claim that the Jews can’t be responsible for rejecting Jesus as Messiah, because He never claimed to be Messiah. This video is just amazing because surely John Hagee should know better, but he is blind. See Isaiah 42, especially verses 18-25
I bring this up today because John MacArthur has posted an outstanding roundup of virtually all of Jesus’ claims to be God. It is an astonishingly long list for a pastor like Hagee to have missed.
here is MacArthur’s conclusion:
“All of the above lines of evidence converge on one inescapable point: Jesus Christ claimed absolute equality with God. Thus He could say, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30); “He who sees Me sees the One who sent Me” (John 12:45); and “He who has seen Me has seen the Father” (14:9–10). And thus we can conclude that “in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily” (Col. 2:9), and we can worship Him accordingly as “our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus” (Titus 2:13).”
The Hagee video has bothered me for a while. I think it shows a susceptibility to which all of us are prone. All of us have the potential to read the Bible to see what we want to see rather than what is there.
Reading the Bible fully to take the text as it is rather than trying to find pieces to fit into a preexisting theological framework is very difficult. It requires the constant guidance of the Holy Spirit and it requires that we approach the word with humility
Obviously, it is very important to read the bible and spend time getting to know God through His word to us that He breathed out for us to have. It is just as important to spend that time wisely by approaching the Bible as it is rather than as we wish it to be.
“Reading the Bible fully to take the text as it is rather than trying to find pieces to fit into a preexisting theological framework is very difficult. It requires the constant guidance of the Holy Spirit and it requires that we approach the word with humility”
This is a great argument for reading the Bible through, cover to cover, repeatedly as we live out our lives. Our Christian culture is replete with Bible verses taken out of context and used for purposes they were never intended. Will Davis had a sermon series called “Did God Say That?” that addressed this exact issue. You can cut and splice scripture to reflect any worldview, and that is a frightening thing.
This is a problem I have with many Christian “topical” study guides that pick and choose verses to apply to a topic (parenting for example). However, they never seek the full counsel of God.
Frank, well said.
That is also why topical preaching as a practice is potentially unhealthy. My brother is a preacher and I asked him earlier this month about whether he does topical or exegetical preaching. He said that he mostly does exegetical and that even when he does a topical message, he exegetes the passages that he covers in order to minimize the possibility of proof-texting.
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