ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CUENet AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION DOGMATICS 2 LESSON 22 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> Okay. Nick asked about explicit expressions of Jesus as God. Are there different ways in which other passages also speak of him as God? Maybe it's implied or demonstrated or -- well, I'm hoping you can tell me. >> DR. DAVID SCAER: I mentioned before that Lutherans have a great affinity for the Gospel of John and how the Gospel of John starts off with some explicit references to Jesus being at the side of God from the very beginning. And being God himself -- "the Word was God" and that the Word was made flesh. I would like to go to another Gospel that might not seem so obvious. And that is when the annunciation to Joseph is made, that the child conceived of his wife, the Virgin Mary, has been conceived by the Holy Ghost. Two things are mentioned. First of all, it says that Joseph is to name the child Jesus. And then you have the prophesy that -- from the -- from the book of Isaiah Chapter 7, the virgin is with child. And she shall bear a son. And they shall call his name Immanuel. I want to concentrate on those two words, Jesus and Immanuel. The word Jesus means God saves. It was the name of the successor of Moses, Joshua. Same name. Here we can do a little speculation. And it's perfectly okay. Was Jesus, as he was growing up, was he called Joshua? Was that the name that they use in an Aramaic community? Now, could it have also been that the household of Mary and Joseph was already Greek speaking. Galilee was a Greek speaking place. But it doesn't really matter because both words mean the same. God saves. Then the evangelists say -- Matthew says this was done to fulfill the prophesy that he would be called Immanuel. Which then the evangelist adds the translation God with us. It might strike you that if the prophesy was really going to be fulfilled, why didn't the angel tell Joseph to call the child of Mary Immanuel and not Joshua? There's something very subtle going on here that can be very informative. And that is both names had the same meaning. Both have to do with God in action for us for our salvation. Immanuel means God with us. But God is simply not with us. I would like to make a comparison with eastern religions, Buddhism, for example, in which God is a presence, an undefined presence. He is simply he there. That's not the way it is with the God of Israel. The God of Israel is never simply there in a mystical kind of way. He is there in action. He is there for our salvation. And in the original situation, which Isaiah describes in the seventh chapter. He is there trying and succeeding to save the southern kingdom, Judah, from its enemies and its succeeds. Now, of course our enemies are different. Our enemies are not military forces. But the enemy is the world, the Devil and our flesh. And in this particular case, Matthew is referring to the enemies which are within us. It quite specifically says that he shall be called Jesus because he shall save his people from their sins. And only one person can do that. It can't be Moses. It can't be David. The only person who can save us from our sins is God himself. And therefore, the name of Jesus is extremely appropriate. And I'm glad you brought up this question. Because it lets us demonstrate a section of the scriptures which we ordinarily do not associate with the deity of Jesus. So that we can recognize him in this particular case. We could also point to perhaps another situation which is not so obvious. It says that in the beginning on the Sermon on the Mount that Jesus went up to the mountain and he opened up his mouth. Now, that's not an unusual phrase. Most people when they speak open up their mouths. But maybe they should open up their mouth a little bit more so we can understand them. But that's not what the evangelist is talking about. He is presenting Jesus as the Old Testament God. As in the words of Isaiah, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken it. The mouth of Jesus is the mouth of the Lord. If we just take a little bit of time as we go through the gospels in the New Testament, we're going to find more references to the deity of Jesus than we ever had imagined. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***