My good friend and WND colleague Joe Kovacs has followed up his wildly popular and fun book, “Shocked by the Bible,” with a sequel – “Shocked by the Bible 2,” of course – that is much more challenging, raising tough questions for most Christians.
One of the things I love about Kovacs’ new book is his use of red letters for all of the words spoken by Jesus – whether they are in the New Testament or Old.
“What?” you ask. “Words of Jesus in the Old Testament? Jesus didn’t speak in the Hebrew Scriptures.”
Well, as Kovacs accurately points out, if you believe the Bible, Jesus is and was and always will be the Word of God. He is the Creator of all things (John 1). Thus, whenever God has spoken to man, it was, in fact, Jesus who was doing the speaking – whether it was to Adam, Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Samuel, David, Solomon or Elijah. In addition, the Greek Scriptures make it clear that the Father and Son are one – always have been, always will be.
The problem, of course, is that most followers of Jesus don’t consider the clear implications of what the Bible tells us – that Jesus is eternal, that He and the Father are one, that He is the maker of all things and, literally, the Word of God – the one who spoke all things into existence.
In fact, I suspect most Christians have been taught to believe, whether they realize it or not, that God the Father was, without putting too fine a point on it, the God of the Old Testament, while Jesus came to Earth with a whole new plan of salvation, rather than one that was revealed as early as Genesis 3:15, a passage often referred to as the proto-evangelium, or “first gospel.”