"My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?"

by Diogenesister 17 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

• 

  Disillusioned JW

  Sea Breeze in this topic thread you say that God abandoned Jesus, but elsewhere you say (and with stress) that Jesus is God, and you use the traditional translation of John 1:1 as a key element of your proof. It seems to me that the Trinity doctrine is tying you into a knot in this matter. The gospel verse isn't simply claiming that Jesus said that the Father forsook Jesus (nor one personage of a 3-person God), but that God, whom Jesus proclaimed to be his own God (by saying "my God") forsook him.

  Even if we for the sake of argument say that the Father and the Son are both God, while maintaining that only one God exists, that would still mean that Jesus was not without God for Jesus would himself be God - even when Jesus died. Yet you say "A just, righteous and holy God has no fellowship with sin. When God made Jesus to actually be sin, he was forced to abandon him so he could die." Was Jesus a righteous and holy God when he died, even though you say Jesus actually became sin? What a quandary the trinity doctrine can cause.
• 

  Diogenesister

  Thank you ff ghost Yup. Watchtower wouldn't know irony if it hit them in the face with a wet fish🤣🤣

  Sea Breeze yours was a beautiful explanation. But Oh boy Watchtower has to drag David into everything and make him centre stage 😂

  Pistol Pete Dr. Price believes there's much gnosticism in the Greek scriptures
• 

  EdenOne

  Some docetic gnostic sects actually used this text to support the teaching that Jesus was a man in whose body the spirit of the Christ inhabited while on Earth. When the man was dying in the cross, the spiritual Christ left the human bodily shell to die and returned to the heavenly realm. Hence, the question: “ My God why have you abandoned me?”

  It was actually against docetic teachings of this sort that the writer of the epistles of John ranted against those who denied that Christ came in the flesh ... to him, these were the “antichrists”.
• 

  waton

  EO, that is a new one to me, the body talking to his spirit as it leaves him, to go to heaven 40 days later. Lingering to have a body again, or the same stored somewhere.

  Glad we did not have that sophistication at the doors when we did battle.
• 

  dropoffyourkeylee

  The comparison between JWs and Docetism has been made before. I used to have a copy of an old anti-Russell tract from the pre-1914 days in which the author railed against Russell for preaching that the body of Christ dissolved after the death. He called it blasphemy that Russell taught 'the Annihilation of Jesus Christ'. There are still some evangelist faiths which criticize the JWs for denying the 'bodily resurrection of Christ' and draw the parallel to Docetism.
• 

  Sea Breeze

  There are still some evangelist faiths which criticize the JWs for denying the 'bodily resurrection of Christ' and draw the parallel to Docetism.

  ALL Christian faiths condemn the JW's for denying this foundational event. Originally, many believers weren't so much following a person as they were following an event - The Resurrection of Jesus in the heart of Judaism, Jerusalem.

  That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. - Rom. 10:19
  
  Failure to believe this is equivalent to a forfeiture of salvation. The WT goes out on a limb here for no apparent reason.... unless their objective is to deny salvation to people.
  
  Apparently, just denying the New Covenant "for the forgiveness of sins" every Memorial may not be enough; so, just to make sure, they deny the resurrection as well.
• 

  forzaitalia

  Many people say those words when they are suffering in a terrible way. Proves Jesus was fully human at the time.
• 

  Disillusioned JW

  Why do many evangelical apologists care about whether the physical body of Jesus was resurrected anyway, since they and other Christians believe they have an immortal soul which will go to heaven upon the death of their physical body and that it could be hundreds of years (or even countless thousands of years) before their physical body gets reunited with their spirit being?

  The vast majority of Christians seem to give no thought to the idea of a future resurrection of their human body, since they imagine themselves as going to heaven as a spirit (without a fleshy body, though somehow looking like such a body in some way) and being in bliss in that state. It seems to me that Christians (and their denominations/sects) who believe/teach they will ascend to heaven as a spirit (and be in bliss as a spirit being in the company of the Lord Christ and the Lord God the Father [who is thought of as a spirit being without any fleshly or physical body]) should ditch the doctrine of a bodily resurrection (including of Jesus), as being a superfluous doctrine. They might as well embrace the Gnostic doctrine of the escape of the immortal spirit from the fleshly body (and without any resurrection of their fleshly body). [Or they might as well embrace the WT/JW doctrine pertaining to the 144,000 which says that such ones enter heaven as spirit beings and will never obtain a fleshy body (an idea which might explain why the Bible says Christ says that in the resurrection their is no marriage/marrying).] If they believe they will be extremely happy in heaven prior to their fleshy body becoming resurrected, then what benefit would they have in their fleshly body eventually becoming resurrected? According to virtually all of the churches (those which don't believe in 'soul sleep', the first Christians to enter heaven did so nearly 2,000 years ago and haven't yet had a bodily resurrection, so my question is: If that idea is true, hypothetically speaking, what benefit would such Christians get by later having their physical body resurrected? I see none.