Friends

On his freelance cartooning website, Australian Baptist pastor Matt Glover features a cartoon in which a man wants to "friend" God but he can't because he hasn't been able to find Him on Facebook. His simple cartoon speaks to the shallow nature of modern pop culture. A "friend" can be someone you've never met and will never meet; you just share trivialities on an internet social network. Some people on the networks have thousands of "friends."
A true friend is much more than an acquaintance and much more than a "friendly" person. The truth is that a true friend is not just a friend; actually they love you. They are willing to inconvenience themselves for you and they are still your friend if you sometimes treat them badly.
It is not a coincidence that a famous gospel song is entitled "What a Friend We Have in Jesus." He endured the ultimate inconvenience for us even while we were still not His friends.

"But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." Romans 5:8

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Matt Glover's cartooning website is at http://www.mattglover.com/ and his personal blog, which features his religious insights is at http://www.mattglover.com/wordpress/wordpress/

Deleted websites

I am removing the following websites from my list of websites because they seem to be abandoned with no recent posts.
Prayer Pups
Christian Affiliate Marketers
The merchants Cross Blog
The Christian Sports Blog
Christian Gamers Blog

On the Human Knowledge of Christ, Part 8

In this paper, several passages from the Gospels have been examined to find whatever light they shed on the human knowledge possessed by Jesus. Starting from the orthodox view of Jesus as fully human and fully divine each passage has been scrutinized always with an effort not to claim too much or too little from what is implied in the verses.

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To ascribe absolute knowledge to Jesus is to make Him no longer Human. To deny that He ever showed supernatural knowledge is to deny scripture. Every time Jesus demonstrated supernatural knowledge , he did so with a purpose in mind.
A rational idea is that Jesus chose to accept the limitations of humanity and spoke only what the Father told him to speak. Although He could at any time have taken on all knowledge and power (Matthew 26:53), He knew only what He was able to learn for Himself or what God told Him. When He said he didn't know, He didn't know. He used "infused knowledge" only when it was necessary to further His mission.
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Fifty-one notes and a forty-one entry bibliography followed. Incidentally, the paper received a grade of A+.

On the Human Knowledge of Christ, Part 7

SUPERNATURAL KNOWLEDGE?
Mark 11:7; Mark 14:131-16; Luke 19:30-34. Jesus told his followers a colt and a room would be available for them. All they had to do was ask. While this may imply supernatural foreknowledge, Jesus may simply have made arrangements ahead of time.
Luke 2:46-52. Jesus was clearly a precocious child but supernatural knowledge, while implied, is not necessary to the passage. What is important that Jesus claimed Sonship to God.
John 6:64-70; Mark 14:18; Matthew 26:21. These passages flatly imply a supernatural precognition unless one accepts the assertions of the gnostic Gospel of Judas which declares that Jesus arranged the whole thing.
Matthew 9:20-22; Mark 5: 24-34. In recording this event, Mark declares that Jesus knew that "power had gone forth from him." I think that the passages may mean that Jesus knew who touched him but the point is that He did not simply let the healing occur. In all of the healing miracles Jesus expected and sometimes demanded an act of faith.
Matthew 17:24ff. Supernatural foreknowledge is clearly implied here. "Natural" explanations all fall short.
Mark 2:1-12; Matthew 9:4; Luke 17:22. "He knew their hearts." Of course he did. It was obvious that they considered him to be a blasphemer and he intentionally provoked it by openly claiming to be not only one with God, but to be God.
Matthew 16:21; Matthew 17:22-23; Mark 9:31-32; Luke 9:22. Any rational person could have foreseen Jesus' arrest and probable execution. His resurrection is another matter.

On the Human Knowledge of Christ, Part 6

Demonology
The absolute assertion that Jesus was mistaken in his belief in the existence of evil spirits and demonic possession is based in truth on a philosophical prejudice. How do you know that demons don't exist?
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LIMITS TO JESUS" KNOWLEDGE?
Luke 2:52 says that Jesus increased in wisdom and stature. He could learn, meaning he did not possess all knowledge. Bonsall described this a s a pure white lily which unfolds, revealing what is already there.
In Mark 11:13 and Matthew 21:19, Jesus curses a fruitless fig tree. Since this event probably occurred in April, before the fig season began, some see this a a sign of Jesus' ignorance and unreasonable annoyance. Frank Stagg, says that Jesus knew full well that the tree would have no fruit and that he used it as a parable. Since the tree had the outward appearance of being fruitful but was in truth fruitless, it was cursed. The main sin of the Jewish leaders of Jesus' time was that they were more concerned with outward appearances than they were with their own hypocrisy.

On the Human Knowledge of Christ, Part 5

ESCHATOLOGY
This centers on Mark 13:32 and Matthew 24:34-36 in the phrase "ουδε ο υιοσ," "neither the son." Some feel that this phrase was added later (it does not appear in all manuscripts) to smooth over the apparently incorrect short-range prediction made by Jesus in Matthew 10:23; Luke 21:32; Matthew 16:28; Mark 9:1; Mark 13:30; and Luke 9:27.
Jesus said "this generation" (γενεα) would not pass away until "all this" came to pass.
Some say that Jesus was simply wrong. Others say that Jesus as God knew the time but as a man he did not. Others say Jesus was not authorized to tell us what he knew, others that it was an Arian interpolation. Some say that "γενεα" refers to the end-time generation. Possibly the best explanation is that the knowledge of the end time was available to Jesus but for two reasons he chose not to take it up. A human could not have such knowledge and the knowledge of the end time was not necessary for the fulfillment of Jesus' mission. (And perhaps the coming of the "kingdom of god" meant something else to Jesus than his hearers understood. In Jewish theology any "signal event" in history was regarded as God coming in history. All of the Twelve lived to see the Transfiguration, and only Judas died before seeing the Resurrection. Many, myself included, believe the Resurrection, to be THE SIGNAL EVENT in history.)
Another event, the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., which the Baptist theologian, Frank Stagg, pointed out was entirely foreseeable, was witnessed by some, but not all.

On the Human Knowledge of Christ, Part 4

The question of Jesus' human knowledge is important in much of modern Christology, especially in that centered on Phillipians 2:5-11, the "kenosis" passage.
Thomasius (1655-1728) declared "he emptied himself" (εκενωσεν) to mean that Jesus emptied himself of the "relative attributes" of divinity (omniscience, omnipotence, etc) and retained only his "essential attributes" (holiness, love, justice, etc). The assumption is that, upon his ascension, Jesus resumed his divine attributes. If pushed to far, this could imply that Jesus was God, became man, and then ceased to be man in order to once again become God.
In response to Thomasius, H. Brash Bonsall, who defines an attribute as an essential characteristic, says that if Jesus gave up any of the divine attributes, he ceased to be God. Bonsall feels that the incarnation involved the temporary laying aside of the divine attributes and prerogatives but not the abnegation of the possession of them (John 17:5; Philippians 2:6-8; Hebrews 2:5-10.) This idea is based on the orthodox christology od The Council of Chalcedon (Jesus has two has two distinct and unmingled impersonal natures in one person with a communion of the attributes of the two. The twoo natures could not be mixed without changing the nature of each. Therefore, if Jesus as a man did not have limited knowledge then he was not truly a man. If, as God, he did not have full divine knowledge, he was not God.
Before discussing two general categories of Bible verses implying either limited knowledge or superhuman knowledge on the part of Jesus, it would be good to zero in especially on two "problem areas."