• The rejection of or the watering down of the deity status of Yeshua is a form of secular humanism. Humanism is that evil counterfeit religion of the devil that he thrust upon man at the tree of knowledge in the garden whereby man (and the devil) seeks to elevate his own status by diminishing the status of Elohim (including the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit). Anything that diminishes any aspect of the Godhead (e.g. the Word/Son/Messiah) and elevates man at the expense of the Word/Son/Messiah is humanistic in nature and follows in the rebellion of Satan whose goal it was and still is to exalt himself at Elohim’s expense. Such doctrines are dangerous and demonic in origin and must be rejected as evil. 

Let us never forget that the mind and heart of man are so deceitful or crooked above all things and desperately wicked that man can’t even comprehend it (Jer 17:9). Not only that, he is totally antagonistic toward the laws and words of Elohim (Rom 8:7), and like the serpent that beguiled men to rebel against the clear word of Elohim, man continues to this day in this rebellious mode with the full blessing of the devil! 

• The spirit of antichrist rejects that Elohim has come in the flesh (1 John 4:1–3). Make no mistake about it, to either diminish the idea that Elohim came in the flesh, or that Yeshua was deity is of the spirit of antichrist. 
• Some people reject the deity of Yeshua because they teach or imply that one cannot believe in the deity of Yeshua without adhering to the doctrine of the trinity. In reality, there are many people who believe in the deity of Yeshua, but who don’t subscribe to the doctrine of the trinity. In other words, one doesn’t have to be a Trinitarian to accept the deity of Yeshua. To wit, prior to the codification of the doctrine of the trinity by the Catholic Church (in the fourth century), in the early church, there were a several other ways of explaining the deity of Yeshua and his relationship to the Father besides the doctrine of the trinity. 

Curiously some teachers who reject the deity of Yeshua at the same time will try to explain his diminished status using rabbinic Jewish concepts. The fact is that while the Christians have the doctrine of the trinity, the Christians have nothing on their rabbinic Jewish counterparts in this area! To look to the rabbinic Jews for a fundamental understanding of the nature of the Godhead, and the nature of the Messiah and how he fits into the Godhead can be great folly and outright dangerous. While the Christians teach a Godhead of three persons, there are many Orthodox Jews who subscribe to the tenets of mystical or Kabbalistic Judaism, which teaches that the godhead is comprised of ten “persons” or “spiritual entities” called the sephirot as illustrated by the sephirotic tree. As one gets deeper into Jewith mystical thought it gets even crazier as the Jewish sages plularize the godhead more. 

• Some people reject the deity of Yeshua claiming it is an unbiblical and Greco-Roman (Catholic or Byzantine) concept. Some believe that no good thing can come from Greco-Roman Christianity, and they therefore throw out the proverbial baby with the bath water. Is this a balanced viewpoint? How is it a sin to think along Greco-Roman lines? Admittedly, the human agents who co-authored the Bible with Elohim were Hebrews who thought Hebraically. But the fact remains that YHVH preserved the “New Testament” for us in the Greek language, and that a large portion of it was written by Paul who was a Hebrew of the Hebrews, but who also spoke Greek, was a Roman citizen from a Syro-Roman city, who was able to quote Greek poets, and debate with Greco-Roman philosophers. In my paper entitled “Hebraic Thought Compared with Greek (Western) Thought,” I show how both Hebraic and Greco-Roman thinking and methodologies have been useful in evangelizing the world — and all this by divine design.
• Some people reject the deity of Yeshua because it has been such a major Christian doctrine for so long. Since, in their view, little or nothing good can come from the Christian church, they reject the doctrine of the deity of Yeshua. We must be fair-minded in our evaluations of all things to always give credit where credit is due. As an aspect of spiritual Babylon, the church admittedly is a mixture of both good and evil, truth and error. Therefore, not all of her doctrines are evil. In the most general and fundamental sense, her teachings with regard to the deity of Yeshua, the message of the cross, the blood atonement, the means by which we are saved and her stand on moral virtues are true. We must not make the mistake of rejecting biblical truths simply because the church has continued to believe and propagate both good and evil. To reject the evil chaff at the expense of the good wheat is folly, and we do so to our own peril!

• Some people diminish or reject the deity of Yeshua by taking a narrow view of the role of the Messiah. True, the concept of the Messiah in the Tanakh (“Old Testament”) was broadly applied to many humans. However, out of this broad panoply of messianic figures, the Tanakh reveals that a Messianic figure would arise who would transcend all the other “messiahs.” Both the Jewish and Christian sages have recognized this fact for millennia. This transcendent Messiah would be a king, a savior, a redeemer, a Torah scholar, a judge, a regather of his people and more. That is to say, the Scriptures (both the Tanakh and the Testimony of Yeshua) reveal that the job description of Messiah is more than just two fold (i.e. to turn the hearts of the people back to the Father and to be the emissary of the Most High). If we narrow the definition of anything (in this case, the concept of “messiah”) down small enough, we can make “messiah” to mean just about anything — including that we ourselves can be the Messiah! This is called “cramming it to fit and painting it to match” our limited view of something. Those who try to diminish and limit the role of the Messiah are guilty of this. The most important role of the Messiah was to redeem Israel from its sins, which he can only do if he’s deity (see Isa 53)! Both the Jewish sages and the authors of the Tanakh and the Testimony of Yeshua knew and affirmed this.
• Some people reject the salvific death Yeshua on the cross by parroting more rabbinic Jewish truth twisting by claiming that his death violates the Torah, which forbids human sacrifice. This is another lie proffered by those who are being swayed by religious teachers who have made of none effect the clear word of Elohim by their man-made traditions. Yeshua’s death on the cross was not a human sacrifice. It was YHVH-Yeshua giving up his life for his friends. His death can be comparable to a father who, in attempt to rescue his child from a burning building or a raging river, sacrifices his own life while saving that of his child. This is not human sacrifice in the sense that the heathens practiced it and which the Torah forbids. Yeshua’s death was an act of love to redeem lost sinners! There is a big difference. If Yeshua’s death on the cross was human sacrifice as the Torah forbids, then YHVH lies in Isaiah 53:10 when he prophesied through Isaiah speaking of the Messiah to come, “Yet it pleased YHVH to bruise him, he has put him to grief and made his soul an offering for sin….” In this same vain vein of reasoning, some Yeshua-deniers will even go so far as to say that the man doesn’t need salvation through blood atonement (e.g. Yeshua’s death on the cross is needless), and that the father’s merciful grace and forgiveness is sufficient to justify and redeem man. Sadly, this line of reasoning totally denies the prophetic reality of the entire sacrificial system as summarized in Leviticus 17:11 which declares, “For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your soul, for it is the blood that makes an atonement for the soul.” I discuss this issue thoroughly in my online teaching on this subject. 

• To diminish or outrightly reject the redemptive mission of the Messiah leaves man without any future hope. Period. To diminish in any way the deity or Elohim status of Yeshua and his status as Creator of the cosmos is to not only call the truths in the Testimony of Yeshua a lie, but it is to leave man Redeemerless. How is this? First, obviously a sinner who is under the same death penalty can’t redeem the life of another (Ps 49:7). Hypothetically, a sinless man might be able to exchange his life for that of one other human life from the penalty of sin, since a man’s life is only equal to that of another man’s life. But only Yeshua as deity and Creator of man (Col 1:16) can redeem all men, since his life as the Creator was worth more than all those human lives which he created. 

To reject the deity of Yeshua leaves man without a legally qualified Redeemer!

• Yeshua warned that in the end times there would be many false Messiahs masquerading as the true biblical Messiah (Matt 24:4–5, 23–26). Paul warned that as the serpent perverted the Word of Elohim and subverted Eve, so there would be those who would come preaching another Yeshua and another gospel following in the footsteps of Satan who comes as an angel of light (2 Cor 11:3–4,14). Those who reject the deity of Yeshua and attempt to peddle another Messiah are the deceivers Yeshua warned us against!

• Some who teach against the deity of Yeshua attempt to make their case by relying on their superior understanding of the Hebrew language. A deep understanding of the Hebrew language is a wonderful thing, and truly helps us to discover many of the mysteries of the Bible. However, this knowledge is not essential to understanding the salvational truths of the Bible including the nature and deity of the Messiah. Yeshua said that the Spirit of Elohim would lead us unto all truth (John 16:13) — not a knowledge of the biblical languages!

Furthermore, if we feel that a deep understanding of biblical languages is necessary to understand the mysteries of the Bible, then Hebrew is not the only language that needs to be studied — so do Aramaic and Greek, since YHVH used these languages, as well, to transmit the written record of his Word to us.

• Some who are rejecting the deity of Yeshua affirm that redemption is based only on the mercy and forgiveness of Elohim alone. This is a lie of rabbinic Judaism, and not the truth of the Bible. The Torah plainly tells that “the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I [Elohim] have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that makes an atonement for the soul.” Yeshua was that offering for the sins of men when he spilled his blood at the cross (Isa 53:10–11; Heb 10:10–18). There is redemption from the wages of sin which is death by no other means than by the shed blood of Yeshua the Messiah! 

The false teaching of rabbinic Judaism that man can be redeemed by Elohim’s mercy alone without the shedding of blood for the atonement of sin is the leaven of Pharisees (the ancestors of the modern rabbinic Jews) that Yeshua warned his disciples against (Matt 16:11–12). These are doctrines of men by which the Word of Elohim is made of non-effect (Mark 7:7–9).