Internal or external devil

 On our ecclesial contact form Anthony Buzzard wrote:

Can you please explain how the Devil can be internal when in Matthew 4 he is said to approach Jesus from the outside? How can the tempter there mean a temptation from within when he is expressly said to come from the outside? Thanks for your answer.

It seems this questioning person has, like several others, a misunderstanding of our understanding or sight on satan, devil, seduction or temptation.

The Satan is according us and the Bible not a figure from a place underneath the earth where people are terrorised or tortured for ever (in hell).

Jesus called at a certain point the apostle Peter "Satan". Peter is a living being and as such the other satans are also real existing beings. Any adversary, but in particular the adversary of God is called a Satan.

When we are confronted with a satan we are confronted by a figure outside us. For us Christadelphians, it is not like for Catholics and Muslims that a good angel would be seating at our right shoulder and a bad angel on our left shoulder. The temptations come from outside, brought to us by circumstance outside us and by people outside us. But how we react onto the temptation is something which comes from inside us. It is our own will which shall either go in or go against the temptation which comes over us. It is our own decision which shall allow the evil to go deeper into us or to weapon us against the evil around us.

The Satan can be any adversary of God, being a woman or a man. But we, too, can be a satan or adversary of God. That is stated by our attitude against God. The stipulation of our attitude to God is determinating if we can be a lover and follower of god, but at the same time it also can determine that we are going against God's Laws. When we allow our thoughts go astray and away from God it is possible that temptation can come from within when we follow our wrong thoughts. That is what is meant by "coming from within".

Do you not think that we ourselves can have different thoughts and have to choose from those thoughts which ones to follow? The right half from the brain, which designates our emotions, whilst left activates the action we undertake, and it is the relation or the strength of the bridge between those two. When you want to come closer to someone it is the right half of the brain which can put on the brakes. Emotion and behaviour have to be balanced. The behaviour is greatly designated by the function of our brain and as such is it something from within us. When the Bible speaks about demons in people it is the disease or the impossibility of the human being to control oneself. In ancient times it was a way to describe ill or mentally sick people.

Those demons and devils naturally can be people around us, and as such are being outside us and have nothing to do with something inside us, except that we shall have to react to them when we are meeting them. That interaction shall demand reactions from us, and those reactions shall be triggered by the brain function in us; It shall be us ourselves who shall have to make decisions and choices how to react.

 

Remember:

There was a lovely harmony in the Garden of Eden. Man was free to walk around and live nicely. He also was free to think and to make choices. There it went wrong. The woman let her mind wander and got tempted by her thoughts, willing to know more.
We have seen that the yielding to the tempter or man’s mind doubting God‘s honesty is treated allegorically in the Edenic covenant as the serpent in the flesh. First man was full of life but now death had come to him. Temptation had taken over and evil had entered his mind. This evil is the “devil” or diabolos of the New Testament, which term is defined as “that which has the power of death” (Hebrews 2:14), elsewhere described as “the law of sin and death”, “sin that dwelleth in me”, “sin in the flesh” (Romans 7:20; Romans 8:2-3).

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Please find also to read:

1. A Book to trust #27 Also words from ordinary and foolish men
2. The figure of Adam
3. The 1st Adam in the Hebrew Scriptures #4 The Fall
4. The 1st Adam in the Hebrew Scriptures #5 Temptation, assault and curse
5. The figure of Eve
6. The Existence of Evil
7. Forbidden Fruit in the Midst of the Garden 1
8. Forbidden Fruit in the Midst of the Garden 2
9. Epicurus’ Problem of Evil
10. First mention of a solution against death 1 To divine, serpent, opposition, satan and adversary
11. First mention of a solution against death 2 Harm or no harm and naked truth
12. First mention of a solution against death 3 Tempter Satan and man’s problems
13. First mention of a solution against death 5 Evil its law of death
14.  A solution for a damaged relationship 2 Sinful nature
15.  Messianic prophesies 1 Adversary – Root of the first prophecy
16.  Messianic prophesies 2 Adversary – Root of the first prophecy
17.  Has the devil got you?
18.  Fallen Angels
19. Satan or the Devil  
20. Devil, Satan, Demons, Evil Spirits and Hell 
21. Hell - Sheol or the Grave
    
22. Hell fire
    
23. Human Nature, Sin, and Responsibility to Judgment
24.  Messenger of Satan
25. New publications: Resisting the Devil
26. Lord in place of the divine name
27. Being Religious and Spiritual 5 Gnostic influences
28. Philosophy hand in hand with spirituality
29. People Seeking for God 2 Human interpretations
30. Marriage of Jesus 8 Wife of Yahweh
31. Autumn traditions for 2014 – 2 Summersend and mansend
32. Autumn traditions for 2014 – 3 Black Mass, Horror spectacles and pure puritans
33. Autumn traditions for 2014 – 4 Blasphemy and ridiculing faith in God
34. Joseph Priestley To the Point
35. Those willing to tarnish
36. Literalist and non-literalist views
37. 1st thought for today “The world may be wicked” (January 16)
38. Christians at War? Christians using violence?
39. To will being present in us but to do it not always evident
40. Words Have Meaning: Devil, Diábolos, Slanderers, and False Accusers
41. It continues to be a never ending, exhausting battle for survival.
42. Reactions against those of the other sex
43. The false prophets in the present world
44. A New Year and a New Person
45. Easter: Origins in a pagan Christ

Wie is Jezus volgens Prof. Buzzard

Naar aanleiding van het verscheinen van een pdf formaat van een belangrijk werk van Anthony Hubbard wens ik te melden:

In de Bijbel zal men nergens het woord Heilige Drievuldigheid vinden. God heeft Zijn Woord niet laten optekenen zodat enkel geleerde mensen dit zouden kunnen begrijpen.

God is een God van liefde, die de wereld geschapen heeft en Zijn schepping lief heeft. Hij wil dat iedereen in het universum Hem zal leren kennen en Hem ook zal leren beminnen. Voor de misstappen van de eerste mensen heeft Hij een oplossing voorzien. Daar en dan kon God een regeling getroffen hebben zodat de mens niet moest lijden, maar dan zou de mens zelf niets hebben kunnen bewijzen en was de beschuldiging van hen ook niet recht gezet.

De wereld heeft lang moeten wachten eer er eindelijk een man geboren werd die ook al werd hij regelmatig verleid (herinner:God kan niet verleid worden) of beproefd niet in de verleiding werd gebracht om tegen de wil van God in te gaan. Deze Joodse man heeft nooit beweerd God te zijn. Integendeel heeft hij zelfs gezegd niets te kunnen doen zonder God, Zijn en onze Vader, die groter is dan hem en tot wie wij moeten bidden zoals ook Jezus dat deed. Jezus was geen gespleten persoonlijkheid die tot zichzelf bad of riep in hoge nood. God, die niet liegt, zei ook over die Joodse man, toen deze gedoopt werd door zijn neef: "Dit is mijn welbeminde eniggeboren zoon."

Voor mij is het jaren geleden dat ik het boek van Hubbard nog gelezen heb. Ik weet dat er al herdrukken zijn geweest en hoop dat nog meer mensen dit mooie werk zullen kunnen doornemen en er van genieten, maar ook hierdoor een lichtpunt zullen mogen vinden in de woorden die uiteindelijk alles wel duidelijk zeggen in de Heilige Schrift als men komaf wil maken met al die dogmatisch leerstellingen die zo veel mensen omringen door jarenlange indoctrinatie of gewoonten.

Het durven afzetten van de wereld is ook het durven opzij zetten van dogma's en het leren luisteren naar de woorden van de Heilige Schrift zoals ze zwart op wit tot jouw komen.

Prof. Buzzard schreef een prachtig e-boekje over een van de kernwaarheden van ons allerheiligst geloof: de Eenheid van God.Hij doet dit vanuit het Hebreeuwse denken.


Wie is Jezus – Een korte studie als bijdrage tot een herstel van het Bijbelse geloof. Download het volledige Nederlandse e-book als pdf-bestand. Lees ook het Engelse origineel. Beluister ook het ingesproken e-book (Alex Tamming) (naar verwachting compleet begin April 2013) of download dit luisterboek.

Preexistence in the Divine purpose and Trinity

There is one God, the Father (1 Cor. 8:6), the one God of the creed of Israel affirmed by Jesus Christ (Mark 12:28ff).There is one Lord Messiah, Jesus (1 Cor. 8:6), who was supernaturally conceived as the Son of God (Luke 1:35), and foreordained from the foundation of the world (1 Pet. 1:20).

Many Christians are unaware that philosophical, mystical ideas invaded the church from the second century onwards via the "Church Fathers," who were steeped in pagan philosophy and laid the foundation of the creeds now called "orthodox." In several articles you from the Belgian Biblestudents you shall be able to read more about it. There and on a.o. the writing of Anthony Buzzard you shall be able to find that 'The seed of Trinitarian doctrine' was planted in the thinking of Justin Martyr, the second century Christian apologist who "found in Platonism the nearest approach to Christianity and felt that no break was required with its spirit and principles to pass into the greater light of Christian revelation."

The New Testament never suggests that the phrase ‘Son of God’ just means ‘God.’ [Yet evangelicalism and certain major groups insists on that equation if one is to be considered a Christian!]

But in the world we do find lots of serious lovers of God who accept the Nazarene Jew Yeshua or Jesus as the promissed Saviour. For them however he is the "man Messiah," the one Mediator between God and man (1 Tim. 2:5). As for the apostle Paul those believers in only One God take it that "To us Christians there is one God, the Father, and one Lord Messiah" (1 Cor. 8:4-6). (Note carefully Paul’s definition of the One God.)

Human beings in Hebrew thought do not exist consciously before they are born.  In the Holy Scriptures we do also find no preexistence of souls. The notion that Jesus was really alive and conscious before his birth in Bethlehem is also a very unJewish idea.

As you could already find in our other writings on the understanding of Hebrew writings, we do have to take that language as our guide and not our modern thinking or the Greek philosophy. E.C. Dewick rightly notes in his Primitive Christian Eschatology, The Hulsean Prize Essay for 1908, Cambridge University Press, 1912: "When the Jew said something was ‘predestined,’ he thought of it as already ‘existing’ in a higher sphere of life. The world’s history is thus predestined because it is already, in a sense, preexisting and consequently fixed. This typically Jewish conception of predestination may be distinguished from the Greek idea of preexistence by the predominance of the thought of ‘preexistence’ in the Divine purpose."

All is foreordained in God’s great Plan and so did God created the opportunity to get a Saviour out of the tribe of David. It is not becaus God knows everything already before hand that because  Jesus who came up in the thought of God before the world was created, that Jesus actually really came into existence before everything was created. The Messiah himself was foreknown, not just his death for our sins but the person Messiah himself (1 Pet. 1:20). Peter uses the same word to describe the "existence" of the Son of God in God’s plan as he did to describe the "existence" of the Christian church (v. 2).

All Jews who looked forward to the Messiah expected a human person, not an angel, much less God Himself! Though the Jews had not understood that the Messiah was to be born supernaturally, even this miraculous begetting was in fact predicted (Isa. 7:14; Matt. 1:23). A "pre-human" Messiah, however, is nowhere suggested. The Son of God "came into existence" from a woman and from the seed of David (Rom. 1:4; Gal. 4:4).(Note that for Arians and Trinitarians, who think that Jesus was begotten in eternity long before his conception/begetting in Mary, that would have been a second begetting.)

Read more about Foreordination Rather than Literal Preexistence : The Nature of Preexistence in the New Testament by Anthony Buzzard

Colossians 1:15-20: Preexistence or Preeminence? by William WachtelThe Nature of Preexistence in the New Testament  or Preexistensens natur i Nya testamentet (Swedish)Who Is Jesus? God, or Unique Man? or Wie is Jesus? God, of Unieke Mens? (Afrikaans)

Bible studies by A.Buzzard in livestream

From now onwards you can listen to Bible studies led by Anthony Buzzard from the Restoration church of God on Sundays at 10.45 a.m. EST at www.livestream.com/rkitect