Daily Words of God | “Concerning the Bible (3)” | Excerpt 271

Daily Words of God | “Concerning the Bible (3)” | Excerpt 271

Not everything in the Bible is a record of the words personally spoken by God. The Bible simply documents the previous two stages of God’s work, of which one part is a record of the foretelling of the prophets, and one part is the experiences and knowledge written by people used by God throughout the ages. Human experiences are tainted with human opinions and knowledge, and this is something which is unavoidable. In many of the books of the Bible are human notions, human biases, and humans’ absurd comprehension. Of course, most of the words are the result of the enlightenment and illumination of the Holy Spirit, and they are correct understandings — yet it still cannot be said that they are entirely accurate expressions of the truth. Their views on certain things are nothing more than knowledge derived from personal experience, or the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit. The foretelling of the prophets was personally instructed by God: The prophecies of the like of Isaiah, Daniel, Ezra, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel came from the direct instruction of the Holy Spirit; these people were seers, they had received the Spirit of prophecy, and they were all prophets of the Old Testament. During the Age of Law, these people, who had received the inspirations of Jehovah, spoke many prophecies, which were directly instructed by Jehovah. And why did Jehovah work in them? Because the people of Israel were God’s chosen people, and the work of prophets had to be done among them; that is why the prophets were able to receive such revelations. In fact, they themselves did not understand God’s revelations to them. The Holy Spirit spoke those words through their mouths so that the people of the future could comprehend those things, and see that they really were the work of the Spirit of God, of the Holy Spirit, and did not come from man, and to give them confirmation of the Holy Spirit’s work. During the Age of Grace, Jesus Himself did all this work in their stead, and so people no longer spoke prophecy. So was Jesus a prophet? Jesus was, of course, a prophet, but He was also able to do the work of the apostles — He could both speak prophecy and preach and teach people across the land. Yet the work He did and the identity He represented were not the same. He came to redeem all mankind, to redeem man from sin; He was a prophet, and an apostle, but more than that He was Christ. A prophet may speak prophecy, but it cannot be said that such a prophet is Christ. At that time, Jesus spoke much prophecy, and so it can be said that He was a prophet, but it cannot be said that He was a prophet and so not Christ. That is because He represented God Himself in carrying out a stage of work, and His identity was different from that of Isaiah: He came to complete the work of redemption, and He also provided for the life of man, and the Spirit of God came unto Him directly. In the work He did, there were no inspirations from the Spirit of God or instructions from Jehovah. Instead, the Spirit worked directly — which is enough to prove that Jesus was not the same as a prophet. The work He did was the work of redemption, second to which came the speaking of prophecy. He was a prophet, an apostle, but more than that He was the Redeemer. The foretellers, meanwhile, could only speak prophecy, and were incapable of representing God’s Spirit in doing any other work. Because Jesus did much work that had never before been done by man, and did the work of redeeming mankind, He was thus different from the likes of Isaiah.

from The Word Appears in the Flesh

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