WE PRINTED THE BEGINNING OF THIS MESSAGE IN OUR MAY ISSUE, SO WE WILL JUST CONTINUE ON FROM WHERE WE ENDED LAST ISSUE. “TRUTH IN CONFLICT” IS OUR SUBJECT FOR THIS MESSAGE; AND WE WERE JUST GETTING TO THE PLACE WHERE JESUS WAS INVITED TO THE HOUSE OF A PHARISEE NAMED SIMON FOR DINNER AND A CERTAIN WOMAN WASHED JESUS’ FEET WITH HER TEARS AND DRIED THEM WITH THE HAIRS OF HER HEAD.

While Jesus and His disciples were sitting at the table, here came this woman with an ill famed name around town. She came into the house, bowed herself before Jesus’ feet and began to weep. Over on the other end of the table sat this Pharisee, thinking, If He were really who He says He is, He would know what kind of character that woman is. While Simon sat there thinking like that, Jesus said, Simon, I have something to tell you. (Luke 7:40) “And he saith, Master, say on. (41) There was a creditor which had two debtors: the one owed five hundred pence, and the other fifty. (42) And when they had nothing to pay, he frankly forgave them both. Tell me therefore, which of them will love him most? (43) Simon answered and said, I suppose that he to whom he forgave most. And he said unto him, Thou hast rightly judged. (44) And He turned to the woman, and said unto Simon, Seest thou this woman? I entered into thine house, thou gavest me no water for my feet: but she hat washed my feet with tears, and wiped them with the hairs of her head. (45) Thou gavest me no kiss: but this woman since the time I came in hath not ceased to kiss my feet. (46) My head with oil thou didst not anoint: but this woman hath anointed my feet with ointment. (47) Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much: but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little.” In other words, Simon, You never did anything to show any respect toward me. You never combed my hair or anything; but from the time this woman entered the house, she has not ceased to wash my feet with her tears, and to wipe my feet with the hair of her head. That was something the average woman would not do; but we can see a picture forming. God has His own way of dealing with people. We see this man that came up the road in the company of two angelic beings to meet Abraham, was actually God showing Himself for the second tie in a visible, bodily form, a form that God Himself chose. Well that same God is seen in another bodily form in what we are looking at now. In this case you have to see Jesus Christ as born of woman two thousand years ago. He grew up from childhood into adulthood just like any other child would; and God was not in Him in those childhood years, like some believe He was. God, His Father, that sovereign Spirit that created all things, entered into Him when He was anointed at the river from His baptism. It was only after that experience, that He began to go about Judaea and Galilee preaching the gospel of the kingdom of heaven. Many times it was what man offered Him to eat that sustained Him. Whatever was offered, that is what He ate, because He was a prophet. He was not God. He came as a prophet, therefore He ate on man’s level just like any other prophet would. You do not find any place in the scriptures where it even looks like Jesus ever went around begging. You will always see Jesus invited into the homes of others in the area where He happened to be. When we look back to God’s meeting with Abraham, it was Abraham who furnished the meat. It was Abraham who furnished the bread. God condescended and came down in that form to prefigure as a type, the coming Messiah, the anointed one. I can say this, As we read the New Testament, we cannot help but realize when Jesus was born two thousand years ago, He was destined to be everything that Melchizedek was. He was also destined to be everything that this man in Genesis 18 prefigured. Therefore I want to make one more comment, so let us go to Isaiah. If we took all the instance where God the Elohim in the Old Testament met with mankind in the form of angelic beings, we could stay on this subject for a month or more. However as we go to the writings of this prophet Isaiah, (We are in the 7^th chapter) we see how God, through this prophet Isaiah, spoke a prophecy that has been the source of much controversy. The 14^th verse says, “Therefore the Lord Himself (the Lord God Jehovah, that is who He is) shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call His name Immanuel.” I want to say a few things right here. Shortly after the turn of the century when God began to deal with men about water baptism being done in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, He definitely did give man a little picture of His oneness. He had to in order to get the name out of a trinity setting and back into oneness like it was back in the book of Acts. However, when the oneness people began to take hold of it, this was one of their primary subjects, “And His name shall be called Immanuel.” Well that is true; but when we come to the time when that prophecy went into fulfillment and was activated, that did not make the man who was called Jesus, the Elohim of the Old Testament. I grant you that there were many times when Bro. William Branham would say, Jesus of the New Testament is Jehovah of the Old Testament; but you have to understand, That is attributed to the speech terminology of us Gentiles here in this age of oneness teaching. We might have thought we were going to get by forever playing the issue like that, but we are not. God is not going to let us get by with just playing around with certain issues like this just to please people who hold back from receiving the true revelation. You know there are people today no doubt sitting on the edge of a denomination somewhere, and they are full of questions. They might ask you, What do you people believe? You explain this or that to them. They say, well that makes sense, but they will turn right around and say, But if I was to preach that, they would kick me out of my church. That is why we either have to preach truth or we are no better than the rest. When man holds tradition and friendship with people above moving on with God, and he hides behind such a mask, thinking he has spiritual security, nine times out of ten he is already off track. He does not even know where he is. When we see this scripture, we have to take this prophecy and carry it through time until we come to the day that young virgin woman did conceive by some means. Of course I know you Trinitarians all say the Holy Spirit is the third person of the trinity, and the angel Gabriel told Joseph that this which was conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost, so how can you make any sense out of the way you believe the scriptures? If the Holy Ghost is the third person of a trinity, then how in the name of common reasoning did Jesus ever become the Son of God, which means He is the Son of Elohim, the first person of your trinity? There is no such thing in common reasoning, that a child can have two fathers. Something is wrong in that formula somewhere. Most Trinitarians do not even realize that God, the Elohim, the Jehovah, is the selfsame Spirit that is referred to as the Holy Spirit or Spirit of Holiness. You are not talking about two. God is ONE. God the Father is not a person; and just to make it even clearer, neither is the Holy Spirit a person. That is defining two office works of the same Spirit that created the world and all that is in it. Oh Bro. Jackson, do you not realize how blasphemous that is? Saints: I said, He is not a person and I stand by that statement. He is a being, He is of Spirit substance. He always was; and He always will be, but He is not a person. When you are dealing with person, you are dealing with something that has a form; but when Jesus, in the gospel of St. John, was speaking to the Pharisees He said this, You have neither seen His shape, nor form, nor heard His voice, at any time. Yet God Jehovah, the Elohim of the Old Testament, the ONE that created all things and all things came into existence by Him, does not live in a form. He is not an object you look for. He is an invisible being, A Spirit being that fills the vast universe. He is omnipresent. That just blows peoples mind, because they think He has to be a person. The only person of the godhead is the Son called Jesus, in whom the Father makes His abode. When God brought forth His only begotten Son by this miraculous means, and then condescended to live in that person of His Son, there, is the only person of the godhead; but that person is not God, Jehovah. The person is the Son of Jehovah. If you want to call Him Junior, that is your words, not mine. I will make mine say what the Bible says. I am glad of one thing, God did take on a redemptive name and that name is Jesus. When the Son was born they gave Him the name Jesus according to the instructions given by the angel of the Lord. Therefore if you really want to get carnal with it, you could justifiably say He is Junior. Why? Because He has the redemption name of His Father. Anyone who would start preaching that would set himself up for the devil to have him running down the road of life ninety miles an hour and all in vain. The only reason anyone would even want to major on something like that would be just for a carnal argument. You cannot take it as a subject with Biblical terminology. Therefore let us just keep it the way the Jewish apostles said it and meant it, and not play with it as Gentiles are so prone to do, just simply because we have an argument we want to carry on with someone. I have no intention of arguing with anyone: I just pray that I may be able, by the grace of God, to say something to help people get their mind’s established on the fact there is ONE eternal God and He is SPIRIT and not a person. The day we were at the airport in Durbin South Africa, there was a man and his wife from Bro. Govender’s church that came and sat beside me. The man started his conversation, Bro. Jackson, the day you wrote the Contender about the one God, called “The Humanity and Deity of Christ,” you will never know what that did for me. I had been in this oneness church for so long, and there were questions about certain passages of scripture that always left a question in my mind, What about this, or what about this; but when I started reading that story, it was not long until my questions were being answered. He and his wife both related their experiences and the conflict that began to go on between them and the people in the church. As they ended their testimony they said, we were in that oneness movement for fifteen years. What a victory, God brought us out of it. It does my heart good to hear a testimony like that.

JESUS CHRIST: PROPHET – PRIEST – THEN KING OF KINGS

We are on a subject that through the ages in the Gentile Christian world, has been a subject of great confusion and conflict. The last scripture we referred to was Isaiah 7:14. “Therefore the Lord Himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call His name Immanuel.” That simply means, God with us. He was not God; and Go was not in Him until after He was baptized by John at age 30. When the oneness people began to see the revelation of water baptism in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, that became a scripture they used much in saying that Jesus is God. There was a time in this century that this terminology was acceptable, because God was not dealing fully with the godhead revelation, He was dealing primarily with the name to be used in water baptism. I am not an educated man, and I am not going to try to present myself as one, but for some reason my Gentile mind just will not swallow everything the Gentile theologians have put out here. I am not finding fault. I accept what God has allowed, but remember, The name of Jesus in water baptism did not drop down into the Catholic Church, and we everyone know why: They would not have accepted it. Neither did it come to the Methodist, nor the Baptist, nor the Presbyterian. None of our fundamental Protestant denominations would have accepted it. Therefore it was dropped down into the Pentecostal move shortly after the turn of the century, when God began to restore preeminence in this experience of receiving the Spirit of God as an experience, apart from that of just being saved from sin and sanctified, with our lives washed in the blood. I want to show you something by the grace of god, and it will take the grace of God in your life to even understand how I want to explain this. I want to show you what Isaiah 7:14 really meant and how we, two thousand years after His birth, His growth and ministry, and then God taking Him to glory, are to understand that word, which is a title, “Immanuel,” meaning God with us. There are many scriptures in the Bible that oneness people have used. It is how they have used them and the importance they have laid on certain scriptures in the light of what they saw, that has caused many people to have such a traditional, fixed idea that Jesus the man, was God Himself. I want to say once again, Jesus, the man that was born of virgin birth, the one this prophecy is speaking of, was not God Himself. I want you to think seriously about this: That man had a beginning. There was no such thing as the eternal Sonship. Jesus, the one that was begotten and came forth from God, did not have a previous existence with the Father before all time. I want to show you what that would lead to, so just try to follow my thought. First of all, if He already had an existence before the world was, as a being, sitting there with the Father, then we would have to say He was the WORD, as some preach that He was, that went forth from God and created all things, because we all know God created all things by His word. Just think then, what a position He left, the position with the Father to be born on earth in the form of a man. The Bible says He because the first begotten of the new family of God, the first born among many brethren. He was a Prophet, He is now a Priest, and He is soon coming to be a King. We are going to live and reign with him for a thousand years. Then He is going to deliver that kingdom back to God the Father, the one that begot Him, that God may be all in all. (1^st Corinthians 15:28) “And when all thing shall be subdued unto Him, (Jesus) then shall the Son also Himself be subject unto Him that put all things under Hi, that God may be all in all.” I just want to ask you this, after 1^st Corinthians 15:28, is fulfilled, what position will that eternal Son (as some of you have called Him) have with the Father? Will He go back as you believe He was before He came into this world? No. Because He is going to be part of the family in eternity. WE WILL SEE HIM AS OUR ELDER BROTHER, the firstborn of the new creation. He did not give up one royal position, to come into a world of wickedness where He had to suffer, bleed and die to pay for our sins. Let us look at it from the biblical standpoint. We have theologians that study Hebrew. We have those that study Greek. Unless you yourself speak the language, you do not know what the book is talking about. You have to think like a Jew thought. If you do not speak their language, to know their thought, you are only playing with issues. It is one thing to learn a language, to get a clarification of a passage of scripture or how a certain word is used, but when we try to establish a finished picture, just because we my know what a Hebrew word meant, we may be playing with issues and not improving our understanding one bit. The Son of God had a beginning, but the Creator had no beginning nor will He ever die. Therefore in order to approach this subject in this light, or from that prophecy, we have to go another seven hundred and a few years until the time came for it to be fulfilled. The anointing of God came upon prophets of old to speak of this Son that was to be born, and also to exemplify something of what He was ordained to be. Many of those prophets were used of God to exemplify and characterize the Christ, the anointed one that was to come later. None of them, regardless of what they portrayed, were the promised Messiah. There were certain qualities about those prophets that did exemplify certain attributes that God would manifest in the person of this man that was to be born, the man that we call Jesus. We know from Matthew’s record and Luke’s record, concerning the birth of Christ, how the angel Gabriel came to Zacharias the priest, who was the father of John the Baptist, then how he came to Joseph, and how he appeared to Mary, speaking to each one concerning the name that this child was to be known by. In the Hebrew His name was to be called Yahshua. Here two thousand years later, because the New Testament, as it came to the Gentiles, was written in the Greek language, because that was the universal language of the hour, they stopped using Yahshua and picked up the Greek pronunciation, which is Jesus. We have a lot of people today that want to go back to using that word, saying when we speak of Jesus, we are saying a pagan word. Let me say this, The word itself might be a word of a pagan language, but I ask you, Who gave the language in the first place? At the tower of Babel, every language we have today was given when God confused their universal language. Every word in their vocabulary was known of God and God knew that race of people would use their own language to speak in relationship to Him, if they ever came into that knowledge of Him. When the time came that Mary conceived of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit was none other than an office work of the Spirit of God, the same Spirit which is the Creator. It is not the third person of a trinity of Gods at all. It is the one and selfsame being that God the Creator is, how He moved upon a virgin womb that had never been with man, to place that little cell of life in it. He created in that womb everything that is essential for the beginning of the little fetus, for the embryo that was to become a physical body, which was the life of Jesus which came from God. I want to say this and I hope you will everyone listen well, God the Creator that fills the universe, which is omnipresent, and also omniscient, did not leave the vast universe just to come into that womb, to be born into this world He had created. Life from God came into that womb. Life from God came into the womb of every women that has ever given birth. That which was conceived in Mary’s virgin womb was different because of the miraculous conception which made Jesus the only begotten Son of God, and His name was to be called Yahshua, or we would say in Greek, Jesus, and there would come a time when that name would mean, God is with us. We just have to understand though, in what manner or fashion God was with us. That is where we are today. By the grace of God I want to show you exactly how we look at this. From the birth of Christ we read in Matthew’s and Luke’s accounts, that when Mary was in Bethlehem, Joseph was looking for a place to stay. That is where they had to go to be registered, to be taxed, or as the German translation would say, for a census to be taken. I am not going to set up some argument about that. The point is, they were in Bethlehem. God ordained that something be made a law that required Joseph and Mary to leave Nazareth and go all the way to Bethlehem. Why? Because that was the place of their heritage, their origin. While they were there certain days passed. Mary, already being heavy with child, and not knowing the time of conception, brought nothing with her for the baby she was carrying. Do not try to convince me that Mary was such a poor girl, that even knowing she was pregnant and due just any time, she dilatorily neglected to have anything laid aside for this expected baby. I believe back in Nazareth, in a bedroom closet, in a box or something, Mary had provided for this little one. That is the instinct of every expectant mother. However because they did not know exactly when to expect the baby, they no doubt believed they would be back home in Nazareth before then. Therefore they did not feel it necessary to set out on the road carrying a lot of cumbersome things. God saw to it that circumstances at Bethlehem kept them occupied there long enough to fulfill prophecy. As it says in the record, After certain days were accomplished, Mary brought forth her firstborn son. Circumstances hindered her from having any of the usual things to wrap the baby in. Hanging on the wall of that cave, which was none other than an ox stable, was an ox yoke. The padding on that yoke probably had not been used enough to wear, so that is what they used to wrap the new born baby in. That was the first thing in the cloth manner that they could get their hands on. I can see Joseph, not Mary, unwrapping that ox yoke with these swaddling cloths. They did everything they could to clean up the body of the baby Jesus, then they wrapped Him in those swaddling cloths. What a lowly birth for the Son of God to be born into. IF YOU SAY HE LEFT HIS HOME IN GLORY, YOU ARE WRONG. HE DID NOT LEAVE A HOME IN GLORY. He was yet in the bosom of the Father as an unmanifested thought, but He was not yet a person. He had a beginning as a person that night in Bethlehem, in that old stable. The Psalms will bear this out. Yes it is true the angels prophesied and told the sheep herders, arise and go into the city. This is a sign that you shall know the baby, you will find Him wrapped in swaddling cloths. They announced His birth as the Christ. Keep in mind that they spoke of Him according to what He was ordained to be, and not that He was already the anointed one. They spoke of Him as the anointed One to be, actually; because, If He already was the anointed one, then He never would have needed to come to the river where He was baptized by John and anointed of His Father. Think of that. You have to take every scripture, every detail that brings out some specific portion of the picture, and follow this as it unfolds, if you really want to get to the true picture. That which was conceived in that virgin womb was not Jehovah Himself, but it was conceived in her BY Jehovah. The life that baby was composed of, came out from God. In the gospel of St. John, it bears that out. Jesus says to them that He came out from God, and He goes back to God, but that terminology did not mean what an awful lot of people have taken it to mean. Such verse stands alone, so to speak, because a true revelation lets you see the true picture. Now with this in mind, we are looking at a fact that an unusual baby has been born two thousand years ago, to a Jewish race. He came unto His own and His own received Him not. They did not have divine revelation, therefore they just looked at circumstances and rejected Him. To them, He was just another illegitimate child. That is the way the religious Pharisee crowd treated Him. I am going to show you why I say these things in this fashion, because when we come to the time we are to see this man as being Immanuel, meaning God with us, it is very strange you will find nowhere in the Bible that the audience, the crowd, the spectators, the ones that followed Him, ever greeted Him, Good morning Immanuel! How are you this morning, Immanuel? It was only those that had a revelation of who this man was, that knew what Immanuel really meant. That is why the name given Him had a compound or double meaning. It is the name of the man, but there were also many other Jewish boys at that time named Jesus, or Joshua. There might have been a half a dozen others named Joshua there in Nazareth, but there was only one little boy by the name of Joshua, whose nature was different than all the others. He knew where He came from. He did not walk around town guessing about what He was ordained to be: He knew He had a special work to do. When He was twelve years old and had gotten left behind in Jerusalem where he was found in the midst of the great scholars, what did he answer his mother when she questioned him? (Luke 2:49) “And He said unto them, How is it that ye sought me? Wist ye not that I must be about my father’s business?” He was not talking about Joseph’s business. He had spiritual things on his mind. He did not take part in the activities of mischievousness with the other children around there. Otherwise we might say Jesus threw rocks through the neighbors window, chased the neighbor’s cat, and was always causing a disturbance in the neighborhood, but we all know that is not so. That was not His nature to be like that. What little is written about Him, His mind was always on His heavenly Father, and that was because He knew who He was. He did not have to ask, Mommy, who am I? He was born with the knowledge of who He was. You and I, the scripture says, are born in sin, shapen in iniquity; but that was not so with him. We have a lot of children in the world today that are like a bunch of wild cats. On our last trip overseas, in some of the international airports, it was pitiful what you would see walking the hallway in front of you. We saw a young boy and girl, they looked like they came from a cave somewhere, tattoos all over them, brass rings around their necks, around their arms and so forth. They looked like they came out of the caves of the Middle Ages. In an hour of time when the world has access to the greatest opportunity of enlightenment it has ever known, their mind’s are so warped they want to go back to some medieval era and dress like that. No wonder the Bible portrays this generation as rebellious and disobedient to parents. This little boy Jesus, in His young childhood, was subject to Mary and Joseph. No one saw him walking the streets at night, creating a disturbance. Very little is written about Him, except for that reference in Luke, but I ask you, How many twelve year old boys do you see in the church today talking to the pastor, asking Biblical questions, and discussing the scriptures? Maybe a few, but very few. I did not say that to belittle twelve year old children, but to just show you the nature of Jesus compared to the average child. The elders looked at this boy and marveled of course. They were not used to having children enter into their discussions. As far as any of them knew, He never went to school. There was something different about this child, because when His foster father and mother came looking for Him, as you read in the gospel of Luke, He went back to Nazareth and was subject unto them and grew in stature and in favor with God and man. Having favor both with God and man tells you something. That tells me that of all the people that lived in Nazareth, there was something about this little boy that was different. The way He walked down the street, the way He talked to the neighbors, the things they saw Him do and talk about, all of this made him different. God blessed this child because His mind was always on spiritual things. That is why He grew in favor with God and with man. It could not help but be that way. That is the law of God. If you had a child today that was born into a family, and for some reason he is always different in that way, that child would soon become known for being different. While the rest are playing ball he is reading something to improve himself. Somehow his mind is on spiritual things instead of the things children usually think about. People say, That child is a loner, but I say, Sometimes it pays to be a loner. This child Jesus, was not God during all those years: He was the Son of God. Bro. Jackson, you are attaching His deity. NO I am not. The fact is, that the life in Him that made Him breathe, and made Him think and act like a normal man, was a divine life. It came out from God. It did not come the sinful route that your life and mine did. It was a life that did not have to be redeemed, because it was a life that came from God, and was manifested as a perfect human being in which there was no sin or iniquity. He was the man through which God had already planned to redeem mankind and reconcile the world back to Himself. That is why God heaped upon Him the sins and iniquity of the whole human race, past, present, and future. This one little man that was walking the streets of Nazareth, one day He is twelve, the next few years He is sixteen, finally twenty. Still He keeps on going, but it tells us in the account of Luke, Jesus, being about thirty years of age, came to the river where John was baptizing one day. What for? He knew when to do that. He knew exactly what the scriptures said about Him. I am going to show you how Immanuel comes into the picture. Up to this time He is not Immanuel in any way. He is Jesus the Son of God; but when He was led to the Jordan River as you see in Matthew 3, John grasped the picture, because the Spirit had already shown John, on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain, this is He. Baptize Him, He is the Messiah. John introduced Him as the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world. When you read the last verses of Matthew 3, you see the account and record. Here is where this man, as prophesied in Isaiah 7:14, because Immanuel. As He walked down that bank into that river of Jordan, and His eyes met John’s eyes, John was a sinner that needed a Savior, but Jesus was innocent, a man in whom was no guile. He did not need a Savior. He was willing to bear the sins and iniquities of all of us to become a Savio0r for you and me. We do not know the whole conversation that went on between Him and John, but standing there, all the people that knew this man called Jesus of Nazareth, a man in whom was no guile. He did not need a Savior. He was willing to bear the sins and iniquities of all of us to become a Savior for you and me. We do not know the whole conversation that went on between Him and John, but standing there, all the people that knew this man called Jesus of Nazareth, only saw Him as the Son of Joseph and Mary. That was not Jehovah standing there, that is Jesus the Son of God. Otherwise called by the Jewish people that knew Him, the son of Mary and Joseph the carpenter. As John took this man and immersed Him in water, and I emphasize the word immersed, because this was not according to the Catholic tradition of pouring. When you go to the church in Rome, on the left hand side as you go in, is a mural painting on the wall, of Jesus sitting on a rock in the Jordan River and John has a pitcher of water, pouring it on His head. That is the Catholics version of Baptism. No, the Bible says that Jesus, coming straight way out of the water, meaning as John lifted Him out of the water, the heavens were opened unto Him and He saw the Spirit descending upon Him like a dove. God manifested His glory. That takes you back to Isaiah 40:3-5, how God said He would be revealed and would make known His glory and all eyes shall see it. I can see the spectators standing in awe when suddenly the heavens lit up with a beam of light showing down on this human being standing in the river Jordan, dripping wet. Suddenly a voice from heaven spoke, “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” A dove was seen lighting on His shoulder. Lighting upon His shoulder signified that the Spirit of God, that Spirit which is God the Creator, has come down and took up His abode inside His only begotten Son. This is when Jesus the man was baptized with the Holy Ghost in the fullness of everything that this Spirit is. He (the man Jesus) was not God, but He which is God was abiding inside Him now; and for the first time ever, the meaning of the word Immanuel, was applicable. God was truly with them (in the body of His Son). According to Matthew’s record, this experience took place at the river; and now they had God the eternal Spirit, the Spirit that created everything, making His abode in this man that was just baptized by John, but the man standing there in the river had never created anything. You religious traditionalists, need not be offended by this, for I say to you, God is going to tear your nest all to pieces. It needs to be tore to pieces. We have a religious world today so stooped in tradition it is pitiful. They made Jesus say things and do things He never did do and say. The Catholics have Him as a little boy stopping at mud holes, taking a clump of clay and making birds and blowing them off His hand. He never did any such thing. That is pure nonsense. We see Jesus in the river of Jordan, the heavens were opened unto Him; and there was a manifestation of this dove coming down and lighting upon Him. That is symbolic of what took place at that moment, but that does not mean the Holy Spirit is a bird. Now that the Creator Himself is abiding in this man Jesus His Son, It means that the man is filled with all the attributes of the great Creator, as pertaining to redemption. Paul wrote in Colossians 2:9, “In Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.” Now you are looking at Immanuel. You are looking at the same man that three hours ago was only known in Nazareth as Jesus the son of the carpenter. Now those that have a revelation can say, There is Immanuel, because God is now living Him. This is borne out by all the apostles through the book of Acts, through Corinthians and through the epistles. This is the story the way the Jews preach it, the way the Jews left it. It is the Gentiles that perverted it. Our miserable minds cannot seem to accept things the way the Jews did. I suppose it is because we think we are so smart we have to change this and change that. Well we wound up with three gods. Some have two and others have three, but those who are guilty of that do not know Him in the way the bride Church knows Him. Our world of religion is stooped in tradition and we build our seminaries to educate Christianity and preachers on traditional nonsense. When it comes to politicians, do you think they want to come among us and respect us for what we know? Not at all. We do not smoke cigars, and we do not carry our social drinks around with us to play politics with them. We are those that are looked upon as the off scouring of the world, the misfits of society. Saints, I am thankful to know there is a day coming when we are the cream of the crop. God is going to skim us off and take us to glory. Hallelujah! We are coming back riding white horses and there is not a jet airplane that will out run those saints. We are coming back here to rule and reign with the KING of kings.

LOOKING DEEPER INTO GOD’S WORD

Brothers and sisters, if you can now see Immanuel, how He comes into the picture, we can take it from there and move on. Let us go to St. John 1. Here is where the oneness like to take you. John was Jew, not a Gentile. You have to catch the thought of John here. We are going to read the first two verses. Whatever John meant in these two verses, is going to bear true through all the rest of the writings of John, Corinthians, the book of Acts, right straight on through Hebrews and so forth. John says it like this, and this is after Jesus has been baptized. Jesus has come back out of the wilderness. John picks up the account as he is brought in contact with this man. “In the beginning was the Word, (This is an English word.) and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” That has to be explained, as this was originally written in Greek, and it has to be understood in the actual English language, how we would write it if we were to experience it for our first time, as John did. I am going to read it to you just like it would be. “In the beginning was the Logos, (which means thought,) and the thought was with God, and the thought was God.” Let me show you how that is to be looked at. Before Jesus could ever become the man that He was, He had to be a preconceived thought in the mind of the Creator. This is what Paul is talking about in the first chapter of Ephesians. When God counseled with Himself, do you think He is talking with three persons in the godhead? Absolutely not. It means God meditated. Somewhere in the eons past, before the world was, God meditated. Before there was a twinkling star, God meditated. Before there was a garden in which man fell, God meditated. God came to a finished thought, This is what I will do. Because of His foreknowledge, He knew man would become a lost creature, and He, who is the only being that has the power to save the things He has created, would have to have a plan, a way of escape or redemption. As He meditated, He did not counsel with anyone or anything. There was none else there but Him. In His finished thought was, I will bring forth a Son in His time, in His season. This is why Peter could say, fore ordained before the foundation of the world, but manifested in these later days to take away sins. That plainly tells you Jesus was not the eternal Son sitting with the Father, saying, Can I go now, Can I go now? This was not reasoned out between the Son and the Father, when He could go. He (Jesus) was not there to go anywhere. There were not two minds in the picture then: There was only one, God Himself. AS long as that preconceived thought was there in His mind, that was His word. If you go to work for someone that is working on a plan to build a house that someone else has designed that is one thing, but if you decide to build a house, and you sit down and raw the plans for it, that is an expression of your thought. That thought in you is your word, because it means that is the way you wanted it, because you saw it as a finished picture in your mind before any manual labor ever entered into the construction of it. That is exactly what God did. God saw exactly the time He would bring forth this Word, this thought, materialize it, activate it, set it in motion. Two thousand years ago God separated that thought from Himself, meaning He activated it by His own Spirit. (That is what God is, SPIRIT) That which was a thought for ages, then became an expressed reality, and it was the Spirit of God that meditated before the world was created, that activated it. Here it begins to be formed in a virgin womb. The Word of God. Once the thought was separated, keep in mind, God is still God, but this that was to be born, becomes His Son. (John 1:14) “And the Word was made flesh, (or the Word made flesh) and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.” For thirty years He walked like a man, He ate like a man, He took a bath like a man, combed His hair like a man, all because He was a man, but He was a divine man. It is a sad thing, that the Jews did not know He was the very Messiah they had longed for. Even at the river, when God came down like that, and publicly demonstrated His entrance into this man’s being, they still knew nothing. God the Father, the Creator, which is Spirit, and the spirit of His Son became a unity. They became one. Now God is in the person of His Son, and manifesting Himself in the person of His Son, that through the medium of His Son, Jesus the man, which became a mediator, a Savior, He would reconcile His lost family back to Himself. Keep in mind, as I said in one of the Contenders, There are two minds you can look at. There is the mind of Jehovah: That is the one that knew all things. That is the one that predestined all things. That is the one that had the ability to foreknow. The mind that was in the Son though, even though it was a mind pure and clean, it never created one earthly thing. It is a mind subject to the will of the Father. From the experience of being baptized, the Spirit He had just received drove Him into the wilderness where He fasted forty days and nights. It was the man that god hungry. Not God. The God in Him never drinks water and never eats, simply because He does not live in a form. That is why you have to say He is not a person. He is a being. He fills the universe. As for the Son, at the end of forty days this man that was driven out by this in filling of the Spirit was very hungry. He was also thirsty. That is when that dirty devil came to Him with those various temptations. Remember this, God cannot be tempted by any one, or anything: Not even the devil can tempt Him. But Jesus, the man that was driven out there, was tempted. The dirty devil that stood there watching this man, thought, I am going to get Him for sure: When He gets through with this, He will be so hungry He will fall for what I am going to offer Him. We all know he was wrong: Jesus did not fall for his scheme. He came to Jesus with a suggestion: (You will notice the devil did not say, If you are Immanuel. He said), “If thou be the Son of God, (Matthew 4:3) command that these stones be made bread.” The devil knew by the writing of the Old Testament scriptures what this man would do once He was anointed of God. Once He does become Immanuel, this man is going to be a miracle worker. It is not going to be the mind of the human that He is, it is going to be the superior mind of the Father that activates the miracles and takes over this whole being. The man, the whole person, the whole Spirit, the mentality of Him, becomes subject to God the Father, that was dwelling in Him. We see this man then, and even though He had the Spirit in the fullness, He was still plagued by the devil. Read it. If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread. That dirty devil knew this man was going to do something one of these days. That is just like the devil still is today: If you people are who you say you are, why don’t you do this and do that? He does it through people chosen to do his dirty work. Well let them stick around: The God of heaven that we serve, is going to make them hang their head’s one of these days, because we are going to go out of here. Before we go out of here though, we are going to leave a testimony that God really lives in our midst; and He is doing something they cannot now see, but will see later. Keep in mind, Jesus was tempted, taunted, teased, aggravated, agitated by that devil in three different areas of life. The first one was tempting Him to be a miracle worker just to satisfy His immediate hunger. Command that these stones be made into bread. Jesus answered him back, “It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” His answer slapped the devil right in his face, so to speak. I have been on the Mount of Transfiguration where this was supposed to have taken place. I do not say it is the exact spot, but it could have been in the general vicinity of where Jesus was met by Satan. It is about eighteen miles from Jerusalem. The next thing Jesus was tested on was to deliberately cast Himself down from a high place and depend upon the angels to save Him. (Matthew 4:5) “Then the devil taketh Him up into the holy city, and setteth Him on a pinnacle of the temple, And saith unto Him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give His angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone. (The devil knows what is written in the scriptures, but notice how Jesus used the written scripture to combat his attack.) Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” It was a vision of course, but the results were real. Oh Bro. Jackson, you scare me when you talk like that. Jesus did not walk eighteen miles up to Jerusalem. Satan showed Him all of this in the Spirit. He took Him to Jerusalem, to the pinnacle of the temple where the battle towers are and spoke to Him that way. He took Him up to the highest part of it. It is a long way down to the ground. If you be the Son of God, come on and try to kill yourself. That is what this meant. In other words, If you are the one that is supposed to raise from the dead, go on and show me you have such power. It goes to show, every quality, every factor about this man, His emotional feelings, His whole nerve system and everything about Him was tested to the most extreme point. Come on and do a miracle, if you really are who you say you are. He rebuked Satan with the scriptures, just like we have to do when we are tested. The devil refused to let loose, even after that occasion. Then He took Him on a great high mountain. I do not know what continent it was on. It is none of our business. He showed Him the kingdoms of the whole world. In other words, the world flattened out. He showed Him the whole world laid flat, all the nations, and the glory of the materialistic things. Just take a look at this. All of this will I give you, Satan is saying to the Son of God, if you will just fall down and worship me. Keep in mind, It is written that Satan is the god of this present world, the material or natural part. He is? Yes, he is. He is the prince of the power of the air. He is the god of this present world system. Again Jesus said, It is written. He would not accept the temptation. (Verse 10) “Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve.” What does the account say then? Now that Jesus has defeated the devil by the written scriptures, defending His position, I can see Jesus the man standing there very weak in body and emotionally upset. Such an ordeal no doubt left Him nervous, psychologically frustrated and very weak, but notice what the scriptures say next. (Matthew 4:11) “Then the devil leaveth Him, and, behold, angels came and ministered unto Him.” Immediately angels were sent to minister to Him. Now to the oneness people, let me say this, God Jehovah that created all things does not get all shook up and need to be ministered to. He does not have nervous spells. He will be tempted by no one, not even the devil. Therefore be assured, It was not the mind of Jehovah that was tested here. It was the whole psychological nervous system of this whole complete human being that stood there before the devil, which we know was the Son of God, that was tested. Angels came to Him, and how did they minister to Him? I can see the angels as they came about and touched Him, the anointing of God surged through His being. His mind was immediately set at ease. His whole psychological and nervous system was calmed. Now the man was able to walk out of that wilderness or desert, ready for whatever battles might lie ahead. You are looking at Immanuel as you should see Him. How many people really called Him Immanuel? They did not call Him that, because that title only belonged to those that saw Him by divine revelation, to be what the title meant, God with us. They knew it was God in Him; and that He Himself was not God. It was God with them in the person of His Son. That is the way the Jews saw it; and that is the way we are going to see it if we are going to get out of here with the right picture. Jesus, was the name given Him at birth; and that is why the Father became identified through that name. Jesus became the name of the Father in redemption. That is the name of the family of the redeemed children of God. God Himself chose that name Jesus, or Yahshua, and ordained that it would be the redemption name of His whole family. You do not say Immanuel when you speak of Jesus, because it is a title and you see it only by divine revelation. In your heart He is Immanuel, He is God with us. For what purpose? Redemption, but in the person of His Son, When we can see it like that, this take us on to St. John 3.

JOHN SPEAKS OF JESUS

Let us go to St. John 3:31 and read a few words there. Jesus is coming back out of the wilderness now and He begins to baptize disciples. Some of the disciples of John came to John, telling him that the man he had baptized previously was now baptizing and there were more people coming to Him, than to John. Well John explains to them how He must increase, and I must decrease. John is bearing witness of this man that he baptized and what he saw take place that day. John says it like this. “He that cometh from above is above all: (because John knew the origin of His life) he that is of the earth is earthly, (meaning whoever is born in this earth of earthly parents is going to see from an earthly viewpoint, going to speak from an earthly viewpoint and it is rare that he can speak from a spiritual standpoint) and speaketh of the earth: He that cometh from heaven is above all. And what He hath seen and heard, that He testifieth; (Why? First, He was not born with a human nature that is divine, without sin. Therefore though it is human in its makeup and manifestation, He thinks in all spiritual terms and not from an earthly standpoint.) and no man receiveth His testimony. He that hath received His testimony hath set to his seal that God is true. For He whom God hath sent speaketh the words of God: (Notice this.) for God giveth not the Spirit by measure unto Him.” We just need to look at this with common understanding. If this baby that has been conceived in a virgin womb is God Jehovah Himself from the very beginning of the onset, then why did God anoint God? With what, was He anointed? On the other hand, If God has created a little vessel of clay and given life to it that has come out of Him, then this is how that which had been, we will say a pre-conceived thought at one time, and lay there in the mind of God for eons of time, but once it was time for that thought no longer to lay there in the mind of God, but to be activated, set in motion, it became the thought expressed. Then it became a literal, materialized word. It is separated from God, and becomes the begotten Son of God, and at thirty years of age, when He was baptized, God came down and put His stamp of approval on Him. How? By coming into Him in the fullness of all His divine attributes, so that He, God, can redeem and reconcile the world to Himself through the medium of His Son. We must look at it in this light: There is a sovereign mind of Jehovah working here. That is why the Son could do nothing in Himself. Jesus did not get up every morning thinking, Well what is on the agenda today Father? No, He did not pray like that. When He got up, God might have already been speaking to Him in some fashion or other. As soon as the Son did get up, it was time for Him to set about doing something, therefore something began to move in the person of the Son, and that human mind began to be taken under control. This is why Jesus could say, The words that I speak unto you, they are not mine. I have said this in explanation to people, There are two minds to look at. There is one mind that is sovereign. That is the mind of Jehovah. This Son, in obedience to that, sought to please the Father. This meant that the mind of God, the thought of God, must show the Son, by some means, what to do. Yet going down the road with disciples, which were just natural men, Jesus was a man that could express His mind on natural things apart from the direct leading of the mind of the Father. Could not this Son of God look over and say, Isn’t that a beautiful flower? Sure He could, because He is a human being. John, pick that rose over there. That is not the mind of Jehovah. That is the mind of the human being that He is. He has every right to talk in human relationships. They could have stopped in any village and got a drink of water and Him say, My, that water sure is good. That is not the words of Jehovah, that is the Son of God expressing His natural human feelings about things. When He saw a woman weeping beside the pall bearers that were carrying the body of her son, He stopped the procession and spoke to the corpse lying there. That was not he mind of the Son that made that decision: The sovereign mind of the Father took over the mind of His Son and put the words in there that were to be expressed. When He said, Rise up, you have the mind of Jehovah activated through the person of His Son. That is why the Son could say, The Father worketh and the Son worketh hitherto. Whatever my Father shows me to do, I will do likewise. You take it all through the gospel of St. John. You see the Father and Son working in perfect harmony. Not one time did the Father have to yank the Son by the nape of His neck, Come back here, I told you not to do that! He did precisely what the Father wanted done. I suppose there were many things the disciples saw Him do that they looked at each other, Well why did He do that? He only sought to do the Father’s will. When we take this and go to another account in St. John’s writing, over in chapter 5, we see that very thing. To show you how we have to see this prophecy in Isaiah 7:14, Immanuel, which only implied the name Immanuel, let me say this, The name did become a plural compound name. Jesus has passed being anointed, He is out of the desert, He is starting His ministry. He has come to the Jerusalem area and performed a miracle on a Sabbath day. Oh that bunch of religious Pharisees got angry. What a horrible thing! Don’t you know we are not supposed to do anything like that on the Sabbath day? When our Gentile, religious world which is stooped in all the traditional makeup and preconceived ideas of what God is and how everything should be, hear of something unusual going on that is a little contrary to their ways of doing things, immediately they climb a wall and start their criticism. What a terrible, horrible thing this is. This is what they are saying about Jesus. I am going to pick it up in the 17^th verse of the 5^th chapter of St. John. In the 16^th verse they criticize Him because He did it on the Sabbath day. “But Jesus answered them, My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.” In other words, whatever the Father shows me to do, that is exactly what I do. So we see it is not the human man, and the human mind, that is doing any of this. There is the sovereign mind of Jehovah, the Elohim inside Him, looking through those eyes, healing through those hands, speaking through those lips, using that human mind because it is completely subject to Him. “Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill Him, because He had not only broken the Sabbath, but said also that God was His Father, making Himself equal with God.” You will never find Jesus anywhere saying, I am Jehovah, I am Elohim. He is always being seen as the Son of God. “Then answered Jesus and said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of Himself, (He is speaking of Himself, the person He is, because they can see that man. They can see how He combed His hair. They could see what kind of sandals were on His feet. There was nothing about this man that made Him look extraordinarily different than the average Jew, but it is what He did at certain times and what He said at certain times, that made them realize, Wait a minute: We have to get rid of Him: He is going to tear up our city. Yes, saints, The Son can do nothing of Himself. This goes to show, if He was God Himself He would not have talked like that.) but what He seeth the Father do: for what things soever He (the Father) doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise. For the Father loveth the Son, and showeth Him all things that Himself doeth: and He will show Him greater works than these, that ye may marvel. For as the Father raiseth up the dead, and quickeneth them; even so the Son quickeneth whom He will.” On and on through St. John’s writing, it speaks in this manner, showing that He is truly a man, born, begotten of God, yet filled with the Spirit of God in the fullness that Paul spoke of later, in Colossians, How it pleased the Father, that in Him, the person of the Son, should all the fullness of the Godhead dwell, which means all of God’s divine attributes and qualities and things necessary to save mankind and lost creation, is now manifested in the person of His Son, that God might reconcile the world back to Himself. It was God that chose the way; but it was the Son that was willing to take my place on that old cross. That is the picture. God did not die. He could not die and still be God. Jesus, the Son, died. That is why Jesus, being the first begotten from the dead, is the firstborn among many brethren. That is why I have said many times, In the eternal age He is going to be our elder brother. People say, Where do you get that Bro. Jackson? Common sense will tell you if He is the firstborn, He has got to be your elder brother. He is not going to be your latter brother. Anyone ought to know that elder brother is a term used to speak of the firstborn in a family. He is your elder brother. You can call it elder or you can say the firstborn. Firstborn is elder. Where do you get that Bro. Jackson? If you have a picture in your mind you cannot help but see it that way. He is not your third brother nor fifth brother. He is the firstborn, and He is your elder brother. That is why He is the first begotten from the dead and He is the beginning of the creation of God. Not the old created creation, but He is the beginning of the new redeemed creation. That is why God invested His authority in Him, that He might redeem the world and reconcile it back to Himself, through the medium of His Son.

LETTER FROM NIGERIA IS READ

I want to take time to read this letter I have here. It is a little lengthy, but it expresses the condition in the country of Nigeria, so here it is.

Dear Bro. Jackson: The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you, your ministry, the church in your care, your family and the Bride saints the world over. I send you Christian greetings and regards in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. We are a newly raised up assembly of believers under the Malachi 4 message of Bro. William Branham. By God’s grace we are also fully and unreservedly identified with the present hour ministry of the Holy Ghost and the five fold. With due respect to God, to whom all glory belongs, we know for sure that your apostolic ministry in the body of Christ has served to open up the eyes of many a confused believer, who for years has been lost in the tall weeds of disjointed quotes, revelations ferreted by the great multitude of self called preachers of this message the world over, especially in Nigeria. It seems that our country is a clearing house for all kinds of isms that have arisen out of this precious message. But God has preserved some of us in His truth, which is none other than the Bible. Of late as in the last convention I attended, God has been doing great things and silently bringing His own together to see eye to eye on truth. Here and there in other sister assemblies, saints have heard and read of what is going on in Bro. Strommen’s, Bro. Govender’s, and your churches, and have been seriously praying for the Bride’s anointing to fall upon us. Somehow we believe we are next on the line for God’s move. Be praying with us. Ours is a new assembly because of certain circumstances that I cannot relate here due to space. But suffice it to say that a group of truth seeking saints that are fed up with the church squabbles, splits, ministerial pulpit power tussles and quote preachings, and divisionless unrevelated leadership, mishandling fo the simplest problems, strife and etc., have decided to stay in their houses and worship God the best they know how and pray for God to do something by the way of setting up a true church. Most of the ministers around are against anything they cannot see in a sermon book of the prophet. As such, the Contender is taboo to most of them. These sincere brethren had waited for over a year or two before God answered their prayers. Presently the church they all once belonged to is split into three warring groups and the place where they used to be, the neighbors are full of bitterness and scornful against the message, at least the carriers. On my part, I have been in Lagos for close to six years, where the Lord dealt with me for one year and five months on the Contenders and your tapes. I had access to them through a certain even that finally led me to Bro. Segun from Nigeria, who once visited your assembly. I have not been to Port Harcourt before in my life, but was a word minister in another assembly in Lagos. At this time I was unaware of the goings on here in Port Harcourt. About two years ago in March, 1994 the Lord spoke to me in a prophecy through a gifted brother, that after my stay in Lagos, that He will send me to Port Harcourt for a work He has for me, and that my stay in Lagos was only to be trained for that job. Well this continued until January1996, when the green light came for me to leave Lagos for the first time, for Port Harcourt. Miraculously, like He led Eleazer to Rebekah, the Lord led me to a brother’s house here in this strange city, the place where I got contact with the rest of these praying saints. All the while the building where their former church operated, having been vandalized by the former warring occupants, had been lying unused. It was built and given over to the church by one of the praying brothers. We have since converted this building to our use. Renovation is going on and God is with us. To cut a long story short, late December 1994, the Lord, through another brother, spoke out as in Acts 13 in prophecy stating that He will use my ministry to raise up a church here and the pastor for that church, after which I will settle in this same city with my own ministry as a minister in that same church. Well Bro. Jackson, I do not know what all this means to you, but to me it is truth and life as everything He told me to watch for came to pass right on the dot. Since then we have started full church services and the members are increasing daily. I wrote for two reasons, to give you my testimony and to ask you to send us Contenders, From the Beginning to the End, from number one to the latest. Also send us many back issues as possible from 1972 until 1995. Please, space will fail me to name the ones I know here, but you know them also. Include us in your mailing list with at least thirty or forty copies of every fresh issue. We need it desperately for the folks here want truth. The teaching sessions we have had on the testing and fall of Satan, the two laws of Eden, etc., have been great eye openers. Please, quickly respond to this S.O.S. May God bless you richly.

SECOND LETTER

This letter comes from Ghana, the country next to Nigeria, so I will ask Bro. Thompson to read it.

Beloved man of God, Calvary greetings to you in Jesus’ name. How is your family, ministry, and the brethren? I am moved by the Spirit of God to write to you and acknowledge the receipt of the Contender and also to share with you that it has always been a source of blessing to me and my brethren. However I wish to make this request. Please, I want to see your picture on the pulpit. Kindly send me any of your video tapes and audio to hear your voice and to see you in action. It is my heart’s desire. I have watched William Branham and heard his message, which blessed me more. Please, whatever it will cost you, I am asking this as a favor. I am a missionary in the rural areas of Ghana. I talk so much of you, but showing your tape or video to my audience will enhance the more. I have a good VHS system at home which I carry through the villages to show the films. Waiting to receive them by God’s grace. Keep on. The Lord increase your strength. Bro. Sam.

GOD IN HIS SON

As I said earlier, when we preached on this subject the last time, I did not intend to ever preach on it again, but after we were in the Philippines and something was said about how certain ones over there had put together the idea that because we did not say that Jesus was God Himself, but that He was the Son of God, there were those that assumed, and were teaching the idea of a senior God and a junior God. Well I will say it again, That is more right than you saying that Jesus is God Himself. God Jehovah will never become your brother. Jesus, the Son of God, will never become your father. Those are two statements you will not find written in the Bible. However what we teach about the Father and the Son is written so specifically in the Bible, it is hard to see how any person filled with the Holy Ghost could be confused about the subject. They are self explanatory. We have educated doctors of divinity throughout the religious world, both on the trinity and oneness side, who advocate that Jesus, whom they call the word, is He which created all things. It is true Jesus was foreordained to have the word for redemption, but He had no part in that which was the word for creation. I am not an educated man. I realize there can be doctors of divinity hear this and criticize me, but that makes no difference to me. There has been the day and hour and time, God has allowed men to become educated because through the early era of the Reformation God was dealing with a religious system of Roman Catholicism that had become so entrenched in the materialistic secular world and the political affairs of nations, it took education to get their attention. It seemed it was necessary for God to raise up men of an educated quality that He could use to restore certain meanings of words and scriptures, but that does not mean He will keep on and on forever like that. The Bible, especially the New Testament, was not written by doctors of divinity. It was written by simple men, not illiterate, but simple men who were Jews of a generation of Jews in which the Law and writings of the prophets had been handed down through the centuries of time from the day of Moses. He wrote the first five books of the Bible. But in the hour of Jesus, there was much in the Jewish religious world that was as much anti truth as it is today in the realm of the Gentile religious world. We are living in the endtime, just before the coming of Jesus fora Church. We must lose sight of this thing that He is coming for a church that has big TV broadcasts and TV personalities. One time they look like a cowboy, another time they look like a clown getting ready for the rodeo. That is the way some of them looked. That type of entertainment has no place in the program of God. In the Philippines they have said, You don’t say it the way Bro. William Branham said it: Bro. William Branham said that Jesus is God. Yes, I know when he said it, I was there when he said it. I just have to say to you, If you did not know the man you would not know what he meant many times. You would have had to listen to the man over a period of time to collect all the various statements he made in relationship to the godhead. I have them set down here. It is true that many times he would be preaching a message on God, the oneness of God, and he would say Jesus is God, Jesus of the New is Jehovah of the Old. Then another time he would say something like, Jesus was the Son of God. In fact, the Spoken Word booklet, Church Order, preached in October 1958, specifically states that on a particular page. He referred to Jesus being the Son of God. Now when that was said, this leads us to another message he preached one time that he went further in explaining the Sonship of God. He said it like this, There is no such thing as an eternal Sonship, the Son of God had a beginning at birth. Now when you put these statements all together, if you do not know the meaning of them and how to put them together and come out with one God, you are going to be lost and confused, bewildered and disillusioned, because each one of these statements will just take you so far in the overall picture. Let us look at it in this light, These theologians who will try to tell you Jesus is the eternal Son of God, and that He always was with the Father from the beginning of time, and that He was the WORD by which God created all things, have no revelation on the subject. In other words that is like the Father said to the Son, Son go do this, Son go do that, Son go do this and that. There is no such relationship carried out in the Old Testament and every one of you sitting here know it. Whoever created all things would be the head of all things. Would you not say so? When the apostle Paul, which was a Jewish apostle, wrote 1^st Corinthians, chapter 11, he specifically described headship. He would have everyone know, that the head of woman is the man, and the head of Christ is God. Well how can Jesus be the source of all creation, and that revelated Jewish apostle come right along and write it that way? Was the Father sitting somewhere with folded hands, and still claiming headship? It just goes to show that this great revelation that is contained in the scriptures is so simple the scholars do not get it. For some reason or other, because it isn’t big enough to be hid from the average person and only doctors of divinity can understand it, they get the idea that we don’t have to understand it. It is a simple picture brothers and sisters. There are certain scriptures, the way they are written, if we would look at them right, which show that God Himself, in the Old Treatment, was manifested many times, as we brought out in the first message when we started on this subject, “Truth in Conflict.” What a conflict we have going on in the religious world. It will be with us until the Bride goes out of here though. IT is a Gentile world, and Gentiles do not think alike. They should, but they never do. When it comes to religious things, each Gentile mind takes this thought, I know as much as you do. I have every right to read the Bible, and expect God to give me just as much revelation as you have. This has been a contest for the centuries of time. There is one thing sure, the Bible was not written, then given over for everyone to put their own private interpretation on what they read. That is why there are so many denominations in the ranks of professing Christianity today, people have done that. Therefore I want to go back to where we were dealing with Isaiah 7:14: Not to repeat everything I have already said, but to fill it in a little more. I was doing my best to show you how the God of the Old Testament became manifested in the flesh of His Son, Jesus the Christ, who was born of virgin birth, but I realize there are yet some who fail to see the true picture. I will try to pick up from the point where we left it and go on. This message will be sent throughout all the world and I pray that the people, whether it is Africa, India, Philippines, or wherever it is, can listen to it with a truthful, unbiased heart. We have to understand what was meant in Isaiah 7, verse 14 where it says, “Behold a virgin shall conceive and bring forth a Son and thou shall call His name Immanuel,” meaning God with us, or we will be led down the wrong road. Now I ask you, IN what way did this prophecy become a reality? How did it come about that God is with us? I will say this, I twas not that God created a body in a virgin womb and then He Himself came down and took possession of that body the moment it came forth from the womb. That is an old oneness theory. It does not exist in the Holy scriptures. That is Gentile, theological terminology. God allowed the oneness Jesus name people to use this approach through a number of years of time, because He was in the process of restoring the importance of getting water baptism in the name of Jesus Christ back into the formula of salvation. Therefore whatsoever you do in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. There is none other name given under heaven among men whereby we must be saved, but the name Jesus, the name of the Christ. That is the Father’s redemptive name; and it belongs to His only begotten Son. AS I have said many times, The name carries a compound meaning. When the angel came to Mary and she was told that she would conceive of the Holy Spirit, there was a name that would become involved. Jesus was to be her baby’s name, or Yashua. Keep in mind, there were other Jewish, male children that were named Yashua in that same period of time. , but those other Yashua’s never became anointed like this one did. Mary’s son, that one that was born of virgin birth, would one day, at about thirty years of age, go to the river and be baptized by John the Baptist, the forerunning prophet of Malachi 3:1. There God Himself manifested Himself from the heavens and came down and took up His abode in His Son. Listen carefully, He took up His abode in the person which was a man, a man who was a complete human being, but that body was not a robot walking around, just being manipulated by the power of God that was in Him. That body was the personal body of the Son of God who came out from God because God the Creator was the source of life. He did not come out from God as a manifested person, like some believe; It was the life in that little baby, that came out from God. That is why for the first thirty years of His existence He was just like any other Jewish man: He performed no miracles during that time. He was born into this world just like any other baby. He grew up as a child, to eventually become an adult. That part was just like everyone else. We read very little of what went on in His childhood and into his young adulthood, other than what it says in Luke. He grew in stature and in wisdom and found favor both with God and man. God does not have to find favor with Himself. That verse alone ought to be enough to show people He (Jesus the man) was not God. With this, we begin to get a picture of how God Himself, the eternal Spirit, who always was and always will be, who had no beginning, and will have no ending of days, manifested Himself to that generation almost two thousand years ago in His begotten Son. God has no father, He has no mother, but He was the Father of Jesus that was born to the virgin Mary, because He created the cell of life in her womb that became Jesus, which was called Christ later on. The Spirit that created that cell of life in Mary’s womb is the same Spirit that was manifested in a man called Melchizedek, back in Genesis, when He appeared to Abraham. That man Melchizedek, was God Himself coming in a theophany form, taking on this compound name meaning King and Priest. Therefore the thing that was set forth in a type was how God one day would become manifested in the person of His only begotten Son. All of that set up a type, which we have to see as one of the stepping stones of understanding, because God knew that through the centuries of time, man would be so limited in being able to grasp and understand His greatness. He set up these manifestations through the different periods of time throughout the Old Testament and we have them to look back to. We can look back and see how God manifested Himself in the form of a man to contact His servants at times.

MIRACLES BRING PERSECUTION TO JESUS

When we read in the gospel of St. John, remember, John was a Jew. Remember that fact as you read the gospel he wrote. Let us say it like he said it, if we want to keep our speech terms clear, but let us also get the same picture he had, because John’s writings pick up at the river where Jesus was baptized. As Jesus returns from the wilderness we find this Son of God, the Son in which God Himself was now dwelling in the fullness of all that He is, was conducting Himself much differently than He was before He went to the river to be baptized. As Jesus returns from the wilderness we find this Son of God, the Son in which God Himself was now dwelling in the fullness of all that He is, was conducting Himself much differently than He was before He went to the river to be baptized. He was not just an ordinary man walking the road of life. He had become a God man. Not God, but a God man. The life that makes Him breathe, the life that makes Him think, the life that motivates His physical being down the road is life of the Son of God, but the life that performed those miracles along the way was the sovereign Creator Himself which had taken up residence in the body of this man. In Him (Jesus) was no guile, in Him was no sin. In Him there was nothing that made it necessary that He be redeemed. He instead, became the means for God to redeem all of His lost sons and daughters in the world. He was His first begotten Son of His new family that was going to be redeemed through Him. That is why Jesus is the firstborn among many brethren. He was the beginning of this new creation. He is referred to as the beginning of the creation of God. He is not the beginning of the creation of this universe. He is the beginning of a new creation of redeemed people who God, by His grace, for the last two thousand years, has been redeeming through his only begotten Son. As I said awhile ago, Jesus the man, will never be your heavenly father. I mean NEVER. He was not your Father to begin with. On the other hand, your heavenly Father, the ONE you pray to, is now dwelling in Him in all the fullness of His God headship. He did not cease to be omnipresent though, just because He anointed His Son with all the fullness of what He is: He is still everywhere else, just like David wrote in the Psalms. Therefore we realize this, God met man in the person of His Son. No wonder Paul could say there is only one mediator between God and man and that is the man Christ Jesus. Well we came through St. John 3, where John the Baptist was giving his last testimony in relationship to who this man was, that he had baptized. Keep in mind, None of those men who were Jews, and who carried the revelation of the omnipotency and the oneness of God, ever spoke of Jesus in the same terminology we Gentiles have spoke of Him in down through the centuries of time. John said this man called Jesus received the Spirit without measure, and that this man called Jesus was not from the earth beneath, He was from above. All that is Jewish speech terminology. We have to understand what He meant by such speech as related to these things. Let us then go to the 5^th chapter of St. John, starting in the 17^th verse. We know this, that after His baptism, and after He came back from the wilderness, Jesus began to go forth and manifest Himself in the different communities, so we pick up this account where there has been a great miracle performed and the Jews begin to pounce on Him and criticize. All they could see was a man. That is really all they could see, a man, because He looked just like any other man and they had no revelation. Let me start in verse 16, “And therefore did the Jews persecute Jesus.” Let me say this, The Jews in their hour, which were so set in such religious traditions, were no different than what is going on in the Gentile, religious world today. When God gives you, an element of people who believe His word, a truth, we will call it a revelation because it lets us see how to put the meaning of passages of scripture together into a picture so you cannot help but see the reality and beauty of it, but the religious world looks upon you with the same attitude those Jews took with Jesus. They persecute you, they call you a cult, they say, That teaching is out of the pit. Keep in mind, If those who saw the physical man Jesus, as He went about performing all those miracles by the power of the great Creator in Him, could condemn that physical man, why should it be any different with us? That is why it left them without an excuse: They saw what was taking place before their very eyes. How much more then, will these Gentiles in this day, which are also bound by traditions because of all their theological studies of the written word, come up with such a negative picture that they cannot even explain, but still reject anything God gives to people like us. If God has not given them the ability to put it together, then it means He has kept it hidden from them. He lets them ramble with theological terminology and words and meanings that are lifeless, and helpless, and it leaves the hearers dangling with uncertainty. Well Jesus is seen here, healing a man on the Sabbath day; and the pious Jews are reacting. “And therefore did the Jews persecute Jesus, and sought to slay Him, because He had done these things on the Sabbath day.” Oh what a holy people they were. I think today, as we hear much about this bombing that is taking place, two episodes within a week’s time, we shall soon see what all this adds up to. I have said this for a long time, that one of these days these liberal leaders of Israel, even though they have a firm conviction that the Torah must be read, and that the Sabbath must be kept, and that they must still eat kosher meat and bread, will in all their other religious aspects, go against the written Torah and writings of the prophets by doing just exactly what they have done. They want so badly to meet all the requirements of a secular world’s way of putting a peace program together, they are willing to take a negative outlook toward all the other scriptures of the Torah. They are willing to offer hundreds of people on the block of sacrifice, hoping to obtain a peace that looks good to the carnal minded, anti scriptural society, but is completely contrary to what God had ordained for them. What a sacrifice of innocent people, just to try to please politicians who want to make a name for themselves. With this in mind there is no doubt in my mind this is one of the means God is going to use to cause this society of Jews to one day wake up to the reality they can no longer put confidence in their leaders, because if their leaders are going to sacrifice them upon the political block of sacrifice to obtain what looks like world peace, then to them it does not mean one thing. God will use it to turn the whole machinery around. When He does, I have to say, Wake up world! Yes saints, there is going to be trouble in the Middle East, because when God does turn that Jewish society the other way, He is going to do it to cause certain things of His word to be fulfilled. He will not take a poll to see how any politicians are in favor of it: He will just do it.

CATCHING JOHN’S VISION

As I read these writings here in St. John’s gospel, I want you to look through the eyes of John, a Jew. Study his speech terminology, because he saw a man that to him looked just like any other Jew. Beyond that though, John saw this man as one in which the eternal God was dwelling. That is why he would pick up certain statements, compile them, and put them together the way he did. “But Jesus answered them, My Father worketh hitherto, (meaning up until now) and I work. (That is Jewish speech terminology.) Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill Him, because He not only had broken the Sabbath, but said also that god was His Father, (Well He is His Father: That is the picture, so let us get it straight.) making Himself equal with God.” You and I know, when you look at the son of a natural, earthly man, it has been said for years, Like father, like son, meaning they are just alike. However I find there is something missing in that picture today. In our educative systems, they are trying their level best to destroy the influence that fathers have had on their sons in the past. They do not want the traits of the parents passed on to their children. These schools of education want to strip every bit of that out of a child. That little boy, who under normal influence and normal reactions, in times past, would have had a tendency to do what dad does, has been taught that he needs to be his own person instead. Well I want you to know, this fellow we are talking about, Jesus, knowing who He was, wanted to do the same things His Father did. Isn’t that a wonderful picture to look at? He wanted to do the same thing He knew His daddy did. He thought it not robbery to be equal with God. That is why Paul wrote to the Philippians like he did. Therefore if we can think like a Jew, we will stop this thing of talking like Gentiles. Oh yes, we are Gentiles genetically, but when it comes to the word of God we want to see and understand it like those Jewish apostles understood it. I have to say, as we live here in the endtime, God will give the Bride of Christ the true picture of the whole thing and it will be beautiful. It will set your heart at ease, it will set your mind at ease and foolish questions will no longer be a part of your life. You can walk down the road of life; and even though your ears can hear the same old arguments and discussion and debates that go on in the religious, secular world, you will know you have grown past all of that. You can know for sure in your heart that there is a true revelation hidden in the written scriptures and that God has seen fit to reveal them to you. It is how it is all put together that boggles the mind’s of the Seminary scholars. I have to say, Thank you Lord! Oh how beautiful the picture is. “Then answered Jesus and said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of Himself, (This is a revelatory expression by the man called Jesus. He knew He was born of virgin birth and yet He knew He Himself was not a creator of anything, so He is deliberately saying that because it was an undisputable fact. The Son, without the presence of His Father, the Creator, dwelling inside of Him could do nothing of Himself.) But what He seeth the Father do: for what things soever He doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise.” In other words, let me bring it down to an earthly illustration and try to show you the picture. It has always been known and believed and practiced, (at least in former times) that the father is head of the family, so let us say they live in the rural countryside. It is the father who has learned certain lessons by experience through the years. A farmer has to be his own weather forecaster. When we did not have all this electronic stuff to go by, the farmer had to be able to look at the sky and come to a conclusion: It could be pouring down rain before nightfall. If he had twenty acres of hay to cut, he would say, Son, we better not cut hay today because it will be pouring rain before nightfall. I am using this only as a natural expression, hoping to get your thoughts pointed in the right direction. If this kind of communication could go on between any father and son, anywhere, that is what you are studying about right here. Jesus is actually saying I do not choose to do anything of my own will, but whatsoever the Father doeth, or shows me to do, that the Son does likewise. Paul had a revelation of what Jesus was talking about, so it is no wonder he would say in the Philippian letter, Let this same mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus. Of course that would be to always do the will of our heavenly Father. Just as Jesus said, The things that my Father doeth, the Son doeth also, and as the natural son will always wait until the father says, We will do this today, like if there is hay to be cut, then he can say, Son, hook up the mower, we will cut hay today, we ought to be subject to the will of our heavenly Father. In the natural, it is the father who does the choosing according to how he determines the day will be, and the son who is waiting for the final word, says, Dad: Just say the word and we will start cutting hay. That is what Jesus is talking about. “For the Father loveth the Son, (what a beautiful relationship we have here in this communication) and showeth Him all things that Himself doeth: and He will show him greater works than these, that ye may marvel.” That kind of talk has driven a lot of those Gentile theologians up a tree. They have played with words because they do not think like a Jew and cannot possibly talk like a Jew. Just watch, as we go further with this. You see the scriptures we have up here. I want the video audience wherever they might be, to remember these passages of scripture. All through the writings of St. John, you get a dual picture. You get a picture of an invisible God you cannot see with natural eyes, but He has taken up His abode in a visible man, who is not an ordinary man. He is a God man. He is the Son of God Himself. He is the one and only Son of God, born of virgin birth, and likewise born without a sinful nature. He was born without sin, without guile. He did not need a Savior because His nature was not to sin like every other person on earth. We came into this world with a fallen nature. He came into this world with a sinless nature. That is why we needed to be redeemed. We can now go on to St. John 8:12, for our next reading. Here, is a part I like very much. Jesus again is looking at a bunch of Pharisees. Remember though, some of these Pharisees were not the common, ordinary, lay type Pharisees of that day. In their midst stood the educated lawyers, doctors of divinity, the high class of the lot. “Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.” Now we understand this, when He said that, it meant He was a living example of the kind of life God is wanting the world to see. Watch Him. Watch how He lives, watch what He does, and be sincere in how you understand this, because He is to be a model for all of us. That is why He said He is the light of the world. He is actually the Word of God fully expressed in a living form. He is not a part of theology: He is reality. “The Pharisees therefore said unto Him, Thou bearest record of thyself; (Simply because He has been saying how the Son can do nothing, it is the Father in Him, yet He will testify of Himself that what He does, He has done it because the Father has told Him to say it. You have to read the previous verses. So the Jews accuse Him, that He is bragging. That is really what it comes down to. You are bragging about yourself. They think He is an ordinary Jew, but we find it different here as Jesus goes on,) Jesus answered and said unto them, Though I bear record of myself, yet my record is true; for I know whence I came, (Hallelujah! Here is where we begin to catch the point that Jesus is speaking in a riddle. He is making statements and hiding reality by talking like this.) and whither I go; but ye cannot tell whence I come, and whither I go. Ye judge after the flesh; I judge no man. And yet if I judge, my judgment is true: for I am not alone, but I and the Father that sent me.” Notice the speech He is using: They cannot understand what He is talking about. He is always bringing the Father in and the Father is the invisible personality. They cannot see Him, so it almost drives them up a wall. “And yet if I judge, my judgment is true: for I am not alone, but I and the Father that sent me, It is also written in your law, that the testimony of two men is true. (He takes them back to the law.) I am one that beat witness of myself, (Yes, He was a man: They could hear Him talking, and they could see Him.) and the Father that sent me beareth witness of me.” In other words, it is what the Spirit is speaking through Him and they cannot see the difference, which would be an expression of the man, and actually the Father through Him, using the speech capability in saying something. There are certain familiar passages of scriptures where Jesus would be speaking to this bunch of religious Pharisee Jews, like where He said, Before Abraham was, I am, that really got them going. They looked at Him and began to say, Why He is not yet fifty years old. Listen to how He talks, like He was before Abraham. Well the one in Him was before Abraham. That is the riddle part. We can say this, When Jesus would say words like, I and the Father are one, this is the Son speaking in defense of Himself because He knew the Father was in Him to vindicate and confirm everything that He has personally taken up His abode in Him to bring forth. When there were things said that God had willed to be said a certain way, it was because this was the mind of God, but the speech that contains the promises comes through the lips of that man Jesus. The speech that is uttered through the natural lips of Jesus, that contains the promise of eternal life to every man and woman that can hear that word and believe, comes from the mind of the Father. “Then said they unto Him, Where is thy Father? (That is the mystery part. We see you standing here talking like this, but where is this other one you refer to as your Father?) Jesus answered, Ye neither know me, nor my Father: if ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also.” All of this sums up to the fact, If you really knew who I was from the scriptures by divine revelation, you could not help but see and know who the Father is. “These words spake Jesus in the treasury, as He taught in the temple: and no man laid hands on Him; for His hour was not yet come.” Now let us go to the 23^rd verse. “And He said unto them, Ye are from beneath; (Meaning your life is life that originated from an earthly birth, coming through the natural law of reproduction.) I am from above: ye are of this world; (I do not live like it, though in the world, I am not of the world, that is how He is putting it together.) I said therefore unto you, that ye shall die in your sins: for if ye believe not that I am He, ye shall die in your sins. Then said they unto Him, Who art thou? And Jesus saith unto them, Even the same that I said unto you from the beginning. I have many things to say and to judge of you: but He that sent me is true, and I speak to the world those things which I have heard of Him.” Saints, we can say this, Those basic things that carries the promise and the security of eternal life to the earthly recipient, were things that were spoken through the lips of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and those Pharisees could not differentiate, because they thought this was just a natural man standing there, Blah, blah, blah, when it was God talking to blah, when it was God talking to them in a concealed way. The very God of heaven was talking of them through the vocal ability of His only begotten Son and they missed every bit of it because of their spiritual blindness. Let us finish this scripture. “They understood not that He spake to them of the Father. Then said Jesus unto them, When ye have lifted up the Son of man, then shall ye know that I am He, and that I do nothing of myself; but as my Father hath taught me, I speak these things.” All that Jesus ever spoke concerning spiritual things was at the direction of the Father in Him.

HOW JESUS WAS GLORIFIED, AND HOW THE FATHER WAS ALSO GLORIFIED

Let us now go to the 13^th chapter of St. John and begin reading in the 31^st verse. It is in this gospel we can see how God became manifested to the human race in the person of His Son, to the point that the prophecy of Isaiah, chapters 7 and 9, became a living reality. Nowhere do you find written anywhere that any of those Jews that follow Jesus ever spoke to Him, Good morning Immanuel. Yet the prophecy said, and thou shalt call His name Immanuel. Notice it is what is in the name, not necessarily the flesh, that makes the difference. The name itself identifies a particular man, but once He went to the river and was baptized there by John, then the Father came down and manifested Himself and took possession of the person of His Son and the literal fullness of the godhead became embodied in the person of His Son, to begin a walk of life so that the Son would talk like we have been reading, but it was not His own thoughts that were being spoken. They did not originate in His mind. The Son is constantly, consistently speaking of the Father that sent Him: that it was the Father that told Him what to say, the Father told Him what to do and He is going to do that, and that alone. No more nor no less. He is actually explaining it, but in such speech terms it literally throws the intellects off balance and tears them all to pieces, simply because they are trying to interpret the whole picture by what they can see. They see the object of a man standing there and they cannot see anything else. This is why that prophecy you find in Isaiah is not a prophecy that the Jewish society is going to understand. Had they understood the prophecy, they would have understood who He was. But because they did not understand Him by divine revelation, Immanuel will therefore only be to those that see and understand who Jesus was by divine revelation. If it was that way when those Jews stood there looking at the flesh, how much more is it going to be that way for you and I to understand the godhead and the meaning of these scriptures, when we do not have the flesh to look at. He have to see it by a divine revelation. That is why we know not Jesus the man anymore by the flesh. It is only by divine revelation that we see this picture form in our minds from the writings of the scriptures. Notice here in the 13^th chapter of St. John starting in verse 31, Jesus speaks again like this, “Therefore, when he has gone out, (Judas had just left the Passover supper, and right here is a statement Jesus made that throws a lot of people off track, especially doctors of divinity.) Jesus said, Now is the Son of man glorified, (He had a certain meaning when He said, Now is the Son of man glorified,) and God is glorified in Him.” When Jesus said this, keep in mind He sees a finished work that is going to be accomplished when He hangs on the cross. To the natural Jewish society they only saw the body of a man they have chosen to get rid of. He is an instigator, He is an agitator, He is an insurrectionist, so let us get rid of this devil. That is how they looked at it because they saw nothing else beyond, but to every man and woman that understands what His death accomplished when Jesus Christ hung there on that old cross, it was a precious thing. I just have to say, Hallelujah! Thank you Jesus: you took my place at Calvary. By faith I see the redemptive work of God, my heavenly Father that created me, and Jesus who paid our sin debt was glorified in that horrible, but also beautiful picture. Now it goes further than that, so listen. “Little children, yet a little while I am with you. Ye shall seek me: and as I said unto the Jews, Whither I go, ye cannot come; so now I say to you. A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. (I am reading this slowly because of the picture I want us to get.) By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples if ye have love one to another.” I have to say that Jesus, if we can take this statement here, Now is the Son of man glorified, there is no way you and I will ever be His disciples unless we can see what He literally meant by that. Think of the pictures that have been made of Jesus hanging on the cross. While I am at this point I will say, A Sister in the church gave me some literature, just two pages that came out of the Middle East, and it seems that there is a testimony now, that there is a mysterious manifestation of the Spirit of God beginning to deal in the Islamic world. When the Gulf War was going on we heard about these people in the high mountain regions of northern Iraq, how the Iraqis despised them, the Turks on the other side despised them also. They seem to be a misplaced people. According to this article these Kurds are the descendants in the 20^th century, of the ancient Medes that you read about in the book of Daniel. In the centuries gone by, they seems to become very staunch believers in the Islamic belief, but all of a sudden in the Islamic world, both among the Kurds and throughout various areas of the Islamic world, there seems to be a manifestation of the Spirit of God conveying the image of Christ to these particular Islam people. Many of these people are having visions, experiences of Christ appearing to them and assuring them, I am the one that died for you. It tells of one woman in Algeria, she had spoken out against a lot of the things in the Islamic political way, the way they govern and rule society, she spoke out against it, wanting there to be more freedom. She had spent four years in jail, but testified that Jesus literally came into the jail cell and spoke to her and gave her instructions. She is working today with a group of people who are testifying in the Islamic world. A lot of it has to be done underground, because you realize the Islamic world is not like other parts of the world that will allow missionary efforts. I bring this to your attention, that Jesus hanging on the cross has been a picture that has been hanging before the human race for almost two thousand years; and much of humanity has missed the purpose of it completely. However if the Spirit of God Himself can do that and begin to bear testimony to Islamic people whose minds have been so side tracked for better than a thousand years, whereby the only picture they could see was a man hanging on a cross, you have to look at it as a marvelous thing. Mohammad never hung on a cross for anyone. Mohammad never promised forgiveness for anyone. It is a religion that is legalistic and mandatory, always, You do this, or that, you don’t do this and don’t do that. In it, there is no promise of forgiveness if you do wrong, only a penalty. Usually the penalty is death. All this goes to show that in the Islamic world there seems to be a lot of unsettled ideas about God. It just goes to show, if God means what He says, and I know He does, He has more than one way, and He will famish all the gods of the world. I will say also, He has many ways He can do that. I use that to bring in here that picture of Jesus, as the Son of man glorified, and the Father glorified in Him, because that is the picture of redemption. He who referred to Himself as the son of man, and whom we refer to as the Son of God, and our Savior, always sought to magnify His Father. How many understand that? Right there is where all mankind has to look. What Jesus has been, from the beginning of St. John’s writing up until this point, all culminates in the fact He took our place at Calvary. There, is where the finished work is recognized. It is only those that see what God did and how it is made possible for you and me, that really glorify God. He is glorified as we accept His provision by divine revelation. Let us go on now into the 16^th chapter. We will read from the 24^th verse to the 30^th. Jesus has by this time taken the Lord’s supper with the disciples and they are leaving the upper room, journeying down toward the valley of Jehosaphat, near the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus is speaking here, because it is in the 17^th chapter that He is actually in the Garden praying. Here in the 16^th chapter He is talking to His disciples, so notice what He says. “Hitherto have ye asked nothing in my name: ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full.” In verse 25, when He made this statement, you have to think back upon all the previous statements He had made, all those statements He made that are recorded in the 1^st chapter of St. John, statements that made those disciples shake their head’s and think, What did He mean by that? They no doubt thought, I don’t understand. Well notice this verse, “These things have I spoken unto you in proverbs: (which means types, meanings that carry a certain type of picture, yet certain essentials of understanding are still hidden. A proverb is just like a little profile. You know there is something there, but you just cannot quite get all the dimensions lined up right.) but the time cometh, when I shall no more speak unto you in proverbs, but I shall show you plainly of the Father.” Meaning the Holy Spirit is going to bring forth things plain and simple to the understanding of God’s true people. “At that day (meaning, when that comes about) ye shall ask in my name: and I say not unto you, that I will pray the Father for you: For the Father Himself loveth you, because ye have loved me, (Listen to this statement: Right here is a statement that should correct this thing in your mind and let you see that Jesus was not talking about Him being an eternal Son, somewhere before all time began.) and have believed that I came out from God.” I want you to know, that when He said that He was not saying He came out from God as a person. No saints, He knew His life was there in the bosom of the Father, and that He was the manifestation of that thought that had been lying there in the mind of God for eons of time. God knew man would need a Savior, so that provision was made before the first man was ever created. Therefore when the day came that God activated that thought, the Spirit that God is, went to work by speaking that cell of life into the womb of a virgin and a little fetus began to be formed. God delegated that life to her womb from His own bosom. This is how the Son of God came into the world; and when the scripture says, “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth,” it simply speaks of how the Word, WHICH IS GOD, Spoke and created that cell of life that Jesus was born from. The Word itself, which is God, was not turned into flesh for the Creator to dwell in, like some think: He just simply spoke the word to place that cell of life in Mary’s womb, and then let the natural process of pregnancy and birth do the rest. It is very easy to understand if you will allow yourself to cast off those traditional ideas about the birth of Jesus. Certain things were said by Jesus purposely, just to drive theologians up a tree. As I said before, God used those educated men in an hour when it took men like that to get the attention of people who were locked up in Catholicism, but since the New Testament was not written by theologians, it is not in the last days going to be interpreted to the Bride of Christ by theologians either, not until they get down off of their theological horse and approach God the right way. They think because they spent four to seven years studying Hebrew and Greek, this gives them authority to explain all of the word of God in every situation; but God does not need people like that to give a revelation to: He opens up the scriptures to those who will humble themselves and approach Him with an honest heart. Those highly educated theologians cannot even think like a Jew, so how could they possibly, with their Greek and Hebrew, ever discover the revelation of those scriptures, that the scriptures themselves say is hidden tot he wise and prudent? Keep in mind, it is one thing to know what certain Hebrew words meant, but when you get to the speech terminology, many times the true meaning is hidden in the way a person talks. If you do not know why a man says things like he does, just observe him for a while. After a while you will understand his method of conveying certain thoughts and then you can see the picture correctly. That is how we have to approach these things. Verse 28, is a beautiful verse. Here, He speaks very plain, no longer in a proverb. “I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.” I am reminded in the 17^th chapter that Jesus says, in the 1^st to the 5^th verses, especially the 4^th verse, I have glorified thee on the earth. That is a statement the Son made as He was praying. Everything I did, I did to carry out your will, I did it to fulfill your word, I did it to manifest your works, I did it that you might be seen, Heavenly Father. I glorified you, I finished the work which thou gavest me to do, it is over. Now Father, glorify thou me with thine own self. How many times have these theologians that want to try and prove that God is three persons used this scripture? They think Jesus was talking about the Father as a person. (John 17:5) “And now Father, glorify thou me with thine own self, with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.” Jesus knew by the written scripture, what He spoke of. He knew He was that predestined Son that lay there in the mind of God, or that word thought that lay there in the mind of the eternal Spirit for the eons of ages, but was manifested in these later times to take away sin. That is why He could talk this way. He is not trying to tell anyone He was a person with the Father before the world came into being. He never did talk like that, but He could see that He is the word that was to come forth to be a means of redemption. Let me say also, When it is written, That by His word He created all things, that does not mean, by His Son He created all things. It literally means this, that by the absolute manifestation, or the materializing of His thoughts, creation came into existence. That is why the Father, the eternal Spirit which is invisible, never has been seen, neither can He be seen, yet you see Him in creation because you see His word. By looking at these scriptures, we can see why Jesus closes His ministry by showing you and me in such simple ways the relationship He has with the Father, and by His own speech said to the Father, I have glorified thee, and everything you gave me to do, I have done it. Every miracle, and every word you gave me commandment to say, I have said it. You told me to go here, and I went. Every miracle, every healing, you showed me how to go about it and I carried it out. Not it is all completed: I have finished what I cam forth to do, and now Father, take me to thyself, let me have that position that I see myself in as I read the written scriptures. That which was foreordained before all time my Father, take me to that. That is why when you see the vision that Isaiah had in the 6^th chapter, and then you go to Ezekiel 1 and see how he spoke, and how each prophet, in different dispensations, saw certain things showing how one day, heaven would look, you can put the picture together. When I read Ezekiel 1, I just say, That is prophecy in the making, because six hundred years before Christ, heaven did not look like that. Yes, heaven was there, but that scene was not in heaven like that back then. That is how the Spirit is projecting it through the written word, that one day there will be a scene manifested in heaven that will be just exactly what Jesus is talking about and what those prophets wrote about. Notice in Isaiah’s account for the vision, that he saw the glory of God, he saw the four beasts, he saw the angelic cherubs with wings, but he did not see twenty four seats. Ezekiel saw the same thing. He saw the four phases, he saw the wings, he saw the glory of the one on the throne, and He looked like the Son of man, but that was absolutely a preview of what would develop one day, after Jesus the Christ was manifested in this world and accomplished what He came into the world to do. Two thousand years ago the man that we have been reading about, the man that fulfilled these prophecies of Isaiah 7 and 9, how that God was truly with us in the person of His Son, and the Son was not like a robot that had no mind of its own, but by His own choice, He manifested all the will of the Father. The Son talked just like any man would talk, yet many times it was God talking through Him. IT was hard for these Jews to differentiate between the two. Here, He is saying, Glorify thou me. When He died on the cross, it brought forth a manifestation of glory. Yet is first brings suffering, but for two thousand years that picture, that revelation of a man that took my place and your place, has been a beautiful picture. Christ is glorified, because He no longer suffers. He sees you and me from the standpoint of a finished work at Calvary. For two thousand years now, the story has been told that the debt was paid at Calvary. God is glorified in it and the Son likewise is glorified in it. You cannot separate the two objects of thought. With that, then we see that when Jesus was taken up and seated on the right hand of the Father, God the Father literally took His only begotten Son and glorified Him with Himself; which really was the glory that had already been predestined for the man called Jesus. When Jesus spoke of that glory it was still in the future, but for almost two thousand years now, it has been a fulfilled reality. NO wonder it says, And let all the angels of God worship Him. Hallelujah! I just want to say, The day will come when that scene in heaven, as it has been for two thousand years, will change. Jesus will step forth from that position and He will no longer be a High Priest interceding. He is going to step forth from that position and He will never return to it. He is going to come to receive a Church which has prepared herself to be His bride. We are going to be brought into His presence. We are going to see Him as our King, as we are made to be lesser kings and priests, to rule and reign on this earth with Him. What a beautiful picture. I had a beginning in Him, because He is the beginning of the creation of God. Listen to what I am saying, because He is the beginning of the new family of God. Adam was the beginning of this old family, but this old family is full of sin. Look at the evil that is on the earth today. Look what the general society of the world has stooped to. It has to be redeemed, whatever part God has determined to use. Yes, Jesus is the beginning, the new Adam, the second Adam, the Lord of glory. When you say the Lord of glory, you have to understand what that speech term means. It is how God, who is the Lord, the Creator, the supreme being, is manifested through the person of His Son to bring this all about, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren. He will never be your father, but he will be your elder brother. Remember what I said earlier, I have people ask me, Where do you get this elder brother idea? What do you call the first born in any family. Elder brother is a term that is always applied to the first born. You can never apply that term to the second one, nor the third or fourth. Since He is the first born among many brethren, in the complete program of God, when the eternal family is done, you will see Him as your elder brother. Because He being the first born, it is through Him and Him alone you have been redeemed and reconciled back to God, your heavenly Father, who created you from the natural laws of regeneration, but He has redeemed you through His Son, who is the beginning of the new creation, which is the redeemed family. He is not only the first born among many brethren, but since He tasted of death for every one of us, He is the first begotten from the dead. This is how we see God, in Christ Jesus, reconciling the world unto Himself.

We still have a little more of this message. We will be dealing with how the apostles preached and taught the gospel; and how they left the story that we love to tell. It is a beautiful picture. We will finish it in our next issue.