- 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!
