Brace yourself! The following is some pretty heady stuff. I want to talk to you about Jesus. Not about what Jesus said, or did, or does or will do. I want to talk about Jesus the person, Jesus the Logos (Word), or preexistent Jesus. Jesus the creator. Jesus the eternal. Jesus, who is GOD.
First let me explain my terminology. When referring to the pre-incarnate Jesus I will call him “Logos,” a Greek word that means “Word.” I will refer to the incarnate Logos as Christ.
I will refer to the part of God commonly referred to as the Father as Jehovah, as he was not a “father” until he sired Jesus through the Virgin Mary.
When I am referencing the Trinity I will use “God.” Keep in mind that this means Jehovah, Logos and the Spirit together in one being.
Now the Logos has always existed. When in Genesis 1:4 God said, “Let there be light,” those words are the logos. The words that were spoken to bring into being all of creation, those words are the Logos. This is what Paul meant in Colossians 1:16 when he wrote “For by Him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities – all things were created through Him and for Him,” (English Standard Version). Logos is the voice of God.
Jehovah is the power of God, the life of God, the eternalness of God. Logos would be powerless without Jehovah, as he is simply spoken word. The Spirit would also be powerless without Jehovah because he is simply a personality.
It is Jehovah that implored Logos to create the cosmos, or the sum total of everything that is in existence. This includes humanity. Man is a hypostasis (a complete, rational being with an individual will) as God is hypostasis. God created us as such in order to have returned to him the love that he is (1 John 4:16). God made us as an object of that love. We, however, were made incapable of experiencing that love fully because of the fall of man in the sin of Adam. God in his infinite holiness cannot abide sin, and thus a chasm was created between God and man. This “original” sin was, and will be, inherited by all generations making us incapable of refraining form sin.
God still loved us in spite of our screw-up, and, because he in his omniscience knew that we would screw up and need a way to regain the holiness with which he created us. He therefore instituted a plan that he had before Jehovah through Logos created light. He would himself become a member of this tainted creation. Logos would lay aside all divine privilege and merge the hypostases of an Arabic Jew by the name of Jesus.
This hypostatic union would take place in the womb of a virgin named Mary. The Spirit descended on her and inseminated her with a male child who would have a human nature and a human body, but not the tainting of the original son of Adam. Thus God in his fullness, holiness and glory masked that holiness and glory and merged the hypostasis of the Logos, now incarnate in the infant Christ, with the hypo-stasis of the infant Christ. Now you had in bodily form all the fullness of God (Colossians 1:19, 2:9)
In masking his holiness and glory, and laying aside godly privilege, he be-came vulnerable to his creation. He was no longer immune to temptation, limitations or even death. Logos was now, because of his incarnation, capable of sin and dying, and was incapable of omniscience.
Now before you call me a heretic and damn me to hell for saying that Jesus could have sinned, let us really look at that. All of the Christians that I know and every denomination that I can think of agree that Christ was tempted. Three of the four gospels tell of Christ’s temptation, and Paul says in Hebrews 4:15 ” . . . we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are – yet without sin” (New International Version).
In order for something to be tempting one must have a predisposition toward engaging in that, which has tempted them.
I absolutely loathe cottage cheese. I cannot stand the smell, taste, appearance or even the thought of the stuff. If you were to offer me even a small portion, I would immediately without hesitation turn you down flat. I would not be tempted to accept, let alone partake of any amount of cottage cheese.
So one can see that in order for Christ to have been tempted to sin, he would have had to been able to sin.
Now I do not think that any Christian would disagree that Christ could and/or did die. He was human and therefore mortal.
Because Christ was a human without sin, and therefore undeserving of death, as every other human is because of their sin, Jehovah accepted Christ’s death in our place so that we regain fellowship with God through being imputed with Christ’s righteousness (2 Corinthians 5:21).
We are now able to experience the love that God is because of the love that God showed in becoming one of us.
Well, Ms. Osborne, how do you like them apples?

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