By Roy B. Blizzard
In Part I of our article, “Who Is Jesus?,” the question was asked, “Why was it necessary for God to assume human form and flesh in order to effect redemption?”
It is important to keep in mind that the Bible is primarily a Hebrew document and that Jesus, as Yeshuat Elohim, in the flesh, was born into and a product of Hebrew thought and teachings. In Part II, we want to note the difference in Hebrew thought between one’s having his part in the Olam Haba, the world to come, i.e., going to heaven, and in being saved. According to Jewish thought and teachings, the righteous of all nations would have their part in the Olam Haba, i.e., heaven, according to the covenant God made with Noah. This covenant consists of seven basic laws.
To the Gentiles who were not prepared to enter the fold of Judaism, a moral code, known as the seven commandments of the sons of Noah, was offered. It consisted of the precepts: “The practice of equity, prohibitions against blaspheming the Name, idolatry, immorality, bloodshed, robbery, and devouring a limb torn from a live animal” (Sanhedrin 56a). By righteous conduct, based upon these fundamental laws, they would earn the divine approval (Everyman’s Talmud, page 65).
Having one’s part in the world to come – getting to go to heaven – and being saved are not one and the same thing.
Back to our question: Why did Jesus come? What did God accomplish as Yeshuat Elohim, the second Adam?" What does it mean to be “saved”?
What about Adam? Adam, damut, and Adamah all are from the same Hebrew root, DMH or DMY. In Hebrew, every word has a root from which it derives its meaning. Every word that shares the same root in common shares something of the meaning of the common root. “The Lord God formed Adam from the afar of the Adama and He breathed into his nostrils that portion of Himself, and man became a thing alive.” Adam, damut, and Adamah share the root dam. In Hebrew, dam is blood. Dictionaries usually show the definition of Adam as “red earth,” sometimes as “red man.” How do we derive “red”? Note the word Edom. The Edomites were descendants of Esau and were called Edomites because Esau not only had reddish skin but sold his birthright for a bowl of pottage, or lentil soup, which is reddish in color. In Hebrew, lipstick is Aduma because it is also red. All are from the same Hebrew root, meaning red as in blood. As for Adam, the first letter, the Hebrew letter aleph, is frequently used as an abbreviation for Elohim, as it is the first Hebrew letter in the word Elohim. We can see then that Adam could be translated as the blood of God. Damut means likeness, or in this instance, an exact duplication in kind. When God created Adam in His damut, he made Adam exactly what He was. As such, Adam was neither male nor female, but both. That is why later, God caused a deep sleep to come upon Adam and took one of Adam’s tzela’ot, here meaning side, but in other parts of the biblical text translated as cell, or cage. Never is it translated as rib. Interestingly, this was all written long before we ever knew that each cell in the human body contains all the necessary ingredients to make an exact duplication of us in kind. We call all such clones. All God would have needed was one single cell. He could have emphasized on the one hand the masculine and on the other the feminine. The two would have been equal to one another as well as equal to God. That is established further in Genesis when God said, “For this cause shall a man leave his mother and father and the two be glued, (Hebrew = DBK) back together so that the two, the male aspect and the female aspect, can again become one so as to be on this earth the reflection of the totality of all that God is.” In Jewish literature, i.e., the Talmud, as well as many other writings, the unmarried man, or person, is not considered as a whole person. Only in the bonds of matrimony can the two, the male and female aspects of deity, be joined together in oneness to be the reflection of the totality of all that God is here on this earth.
“And the Lord God, YHWH Elohim, formed Adam from afar, dust, or minute particle.” Afar can mean a minute particle of something. Again, this was written before we knew that all matter was formed out of minute particles that we call atoms. “And the Lord God formed Adam from the minute particles of the Adamah.” Adamah, often translated “dust,” can be seen as composed of the root dam; the aleph for elohim at the beginning and, the He, for YHWH, at the end. Perhaps a better reading for Gen 2:7 would be “and YHWH Elohim (the covenant/creative diety) formed Adam from the minute particles of the totality of all that God is, and breathed into his nostrils that portion of himself and Adam became a thing just like God.”
However, something happened. That Godness was corrupted by Adam’s sin. When Adam sinned something must have happened to the blood, that which had come to man from God, for now it becomes an immutable law that “the soul that sinneth, it shall surely die.” When does death come? Only when the life-giving blood ceases to flow through the veins to nourish the tissues and carry off waste products. “Life is in the blood.” With sin also comes God’s means of atonement, “Without the shedding of blood there can be no forgiveness of sin.”
Note that Jesus is called “the second Adam,” the second blood of God. In that, there is supreme importance. God is the sum and total of all of His parts, and we best understand God by looking at His names that reflect things that God is doing, which, in turn, helps us understand the nature of God. God is what He is doing. One of the names for God is Yeshuat Elohim. “And all flesh shall see God redeeming.” Again, however, the question arises of the necessity of God becoming flesh. One of the principal characteristics of the Hebrew language is parallelisms, which only means saying the same thing over again several different ways, but all of which are co-equal. The Greek mind has great difficulty understanding the synonyms, the parallelisms of Hebrew, as does the Western mind. However, these characteristics must be kept in mind before this can be understood.
In the creation of Adam, God breathed into Adam that portion of himself, namely dam, and man became a thing alive. It was not literally that blood was breathed into Adam’s nostrils, but blood is the vehicle through which that spark of life is carried to all of the cells and tissues. This is why God repeats over and over that “life is in the blood.” Again, without the shedding of blood, there can be no remission of sin. Notice also that the blood of bulls and goats, or of animals or of beasts of the field, could not take away sin because it was not incorruptible blood. It was not the blood of God. God said, “I, I myself am going to seek and save.” (Eze. 34) How could He do this if “without the shedding of blood there can be no forgiveness of sin”? Remember…Jesus never tried to hide His deity.
In John 5:18-21, Jesus says, “I assure you, I most solemnly tell you that the person whose ears are “open” to my words, who listens to my message, and believes and trusts in and clings to and relies upon Him who sent me has eternal life and does not come unto judgment but has already passed out of death unto life. Believe me when I tell you the time is coming and is now here when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear it shall live. For even as the Father has life in himself and is self-existent so He is given to the Son to have life In himself and be self-existent and has given Him authority and granted Him power to execute judgment because He is a Son of Man.” This refers to Daniel 7:13-14, in which the Son of Man is the one who is given authority to judge the nations, to judge the kingdom, and Jesus is claiming that for himself.
Colossians 1:13, “The Father has delivered and drawn us to Himself out of the control and the dominion of darkness and has transferred us into the kingdom of the son of His love in whom we have our redemption through His blood, which means the forgiveness of our sins. He is the exact likeness of the unseen God, the visible representation of the invisible, the firstborn of all creation.” The Father has already delivered us unto Himself and transferred us out of the control of darkness, or the forces of this world. Paul said, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” If we could only get this, if we really understood what God has done for us; we would not even be bound by the natural laws that govern the operation of this world. That is what Yeshua meant. When Peter and John went into the temple and saw the man there crippled and begging alms, they said, “Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have, I give unto you; take up your bed and walk,” and the man took up his bed and walked. God provided this, accomplished this, for his children. In the person of Yeshua menatzeret, (Yeshua of Nazareth), and He said all of that happened because, verse 14, “…we have our redemption through His blood.” “Know ye not that you were not redeemed with corruptible things as silver and gold…but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and with spot…” (1 Peter 1:18-19).
How then is it possible that Jesus could have been born of human flesh and made to be a partaker of human flesh and yet not a partaker of man’s corruptible blood? The answer, of course, is in His divine birth; not a virgin birth, but divine birth. A virgin birth, in science, is called “parthenogenesis.” It means a resultant offspring from the female mother without the introduction of male sperm. We are able in the laboratory, in lower forms of life, to induce the mitotic, or the cellular division of the female egg with the introduction of an electrical shock so that the resultant offspring is what we call a parthenogenic birth. Nowhere in the Bible do we have an indication of that insofar as the birth of Jesus was concerned. Instead of stating that it was a virgin birth, the Bible says simply that Mary was a virgin, and “that which was conceived in her womb was conceived after the Holy Spirit had come upon her.” The Bible simply says that Mary was a virgin and that the conception did not take place until the Holy Spirit had come upon her.
This is of the utmost importance because, in the human of the species, the blood that develops within the fetus begins to develop after the introduction of the male sperm, or the male element, and from the moment of conception, the fetus begins to form its own independent blood supply. Throughout the whole course of pregnancy, there is never any direct interchange of blood between the mother and the fetus. All of the nourishment and the carrying off of waste products is done through the process of osmosis. By the ninth week, the fetus has formed its own independent blood supply. The heart is about the size of a pea and has four little valves with tiny, veil-like pumps that are pumping the blood through myriads of little thread-like veins and arteries. From the moment of conception throughout the entire course of pregnancy, there is no direct interchange of blood between the mother and the fetus. That is the reason why it necessitated, a divine birth and God taking on the form of human flesh because only divine blood, incorruptible blood, could atone for sin.
Now the big question. Does that mean that everybody has to accept Jesus as the Messiah in order to be “saved”? Since “saved” does not have anything necessarily to do with getting to go to heaven, the question would be better stated, does that mean that everyone has to accept Jesus in order to go to heaven? If the righteous Gentile is able to have his part in the world to come according to the seven laws of Noah, he does not even have to be fully knowledgeable about God. “Saved” is for this world. However, the Bible says that we are saved by the shedding of blood, by the blood of Jesus, His incorruptible blood, and Jesus said, “I am the way, I am the truth, I am the life, and no man comes to the Father but by Me.”
Many other passages indicate the same, but one factor we fail to take into consideration is that Jesus is God. He was the pre-existent Messiah, the Lamb of God which taketh away the sins of the world, and that was an accomplished fact in the mind of God from the beginning so that no man ever came to God except by virtue of what God did in His redemptive act as Yeshuat Elohim. Not Abel, not Enoch, not Elijah, not anybody. Jesus was “the Lamb of God that was slain from the foundations of the world.” Yet…there comes that moment in which that which is there as an established fact in the mind of God from the beginning becomes a historical reality in the space-time continuum “I am the way, I am the Truth, I am the life….” No man ever “came to the Father except by virtue of what God did in His redemptive act as Yeshuat Elohim.” That is the reason why He had to take on the form of human flesh, be a partaker of human flesh, yet not a partaker of man’s corruptible blood because only incorruptible blood could atone ultimately for sin. In this we see, not just theologically, but scientifically how it could be accomplished.
Seeing it from this perspective, I am suddenly overwhelmed with the grandeur of God, with the glory of God, that could have conceived and designed such a grand and magnificent plan for my ultimate reconciliation, from the very beginning. Overwhelmed by how, from the very beginning, He marvelously formed the female of the species that she could ultimately be the vehicle through whom redemption could become an established fact in the space-time continuum.
2 Corinthians 3:18, “And all of us, as with unveiled face, because we continued to behold in the word of God as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are constantly being transfigured into His very own image in ever increasing splendor and from one degree of glory to the other for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.” First, we are told that all of us are in the process of being transfigured or transformed into His image and His likeness. Again, 2 Corinthians 4:4, “the god of this world” is God, who has blinded the unbeliever’s eyes, preventing them from seeing the illuminating light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, the Messiah, who is the “image and the likeness of God.” This is a reference back to Genesis 1:27, “Let us make Adam in our image and our likeness.”
In 1 Corinthians 15:45, “the first Adam became a thing alive,” but forfeited his heritage; however, “the last Adam became a life-giving spirit restoring the dead to life.” Who was this second Adam? In the book, Jewish Sources in Early Christianity, by Professor David Flusser of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, on page 59, the identification of the last Adam is made clear. “To sum up, the celestial biography found in the New Testament consists entirely of Jewish motifs: Jesus the Messiah had existed before the creation of the world; he entered the world, or even created it; He became flesh…and then brought about redemption; He is the Messiah, the bar Enash, the Last Adam; and He atones for sin just like those who atoned for the sins of Israel and then comes back to life.” These are all Jewish ideas and concepts.
I am much concerned that the Jews have allowed the Christians to rob them of their Jewish Jesus. All of this is totally Jewish, but when the western church came in with their misunderstandings and misinterpretations, not only were they confused but, in turn, confused those from whom these ideas and concepts had originally flowed.
The second point here is that, “…for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.” Note that Lord and Spirit are used interchangeably. Kurios is also known as pneuma. Again, this is that Jewish influence of synonymous parallelisms, the one being equal to the other. Colossians 3:10; “And have clothed yourself with a new spiritual self which is ever in the process of being renewed and remolded into fuller and more perfect knowledge upon knowledge after the image of Him who created it.” The cross reference is again back to Genesis 1:26-27, a reference to the pre-existent Messiah. 2 Corinthians 5:21, “For our sake, He made Christ to be sin who knew no sin so that in Him we might be viewed as the righteousness of God.” We are righteous not because of what we are but because of what God is. That is what one of the names of God is, mekadesh, YHWH mekadesh, the One who sanctifies me, or causes me to be righteous. Romans 3:21, further amplifies this, “But now the righteousness of God has been revealed independently and altogether apart from law, although actually is attested by law and the prophets, namely, the righteousness of God which comes by the faith of Jesus unto all….” It is the righteousness of God which comes as a result of the redemptive act that God performed in the person of Yeshuat Elohim. We are declared to be righteous, not because of what we are but because of what He is.
What is the significance of this? Galatians 2:16, “Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law but by the faith of Jesus Christ. Even we have believed in Jesus Christ that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law, for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified.” Just so we do not misunderstand Paul, we must remember that Paul was by his own words “a Pharisee of the Pharisees and a Hebrew of the Hebrews” and that everything he is talking about is Jewish and has to do with Jewish things. Paul is not putting down the law. Paul was very observant of the law, so observant that he even took Timothy and circumcised him so that he could take Timothy with him to places where a non-circumcised person was not allowed. However, in Paul’s day, there were many different sects of the Jews that we have been able to identify, and each had some different concept. One particular sect was called Judaizers, who believed that no one could be saved or have their part in the world to come except by keeping the law, and that was contrary to the main stream of Jewish thought. Paul said a person would not be saved by observing the law, but that salvation is something God gave to man out of the abundance of His grace. Salvation is by grace. It is all grace. God did it by grace from the very beginning and there is not anything that any man anywhere on the face of God’s earth can do to earn it. We are not declared to be righteous by observing or keeping the law, but we are declared to be righteous by virtue of what God did for us when we did not deserve it. We are made righteous by the faithfulness of Yeshuat Elohim, who accomplished for us what we could not do for ourselves. I become what I am not because of what I am but because of what He is, and I am declared to be righteous by faith, or faithfulness. In Hebrew faith means faithfulness. Faith is action! I am declared to be righteous by the virtue of what happened in the redemptive act of God as of Yeshuat Elohim.
What is very important in all of this can be found in Ephesians 3:16 ff
“May He grant you out of the rich treasury of His glory to be strengthened and re-enforced with mighty power in the inner man, by the Holy Spirit himself indwelling your innermost being and personality. May Christ through faith actually dwell, settle down, abide, and make his permanent home in your hearts. May you be rooted deep in love and founded securely on love, that you may have the power and be strong to apprehend and grasp with all the saints, God's devoted people, what is the breadth and the length and the depth, that you may really come to know practically through experience for yourself the love of Christ which far surpasses mere knowledge without experience, that you may be filled through all your being unto all the fullness of God, that is that you may have the richest measure of the divine presence and become a body wholly filled and flooded with God himself.”
That is the capacity that man has as a child of God.
Again, notice the different designations, Spirit, Christ, God. We keep trying to see these as different entities. Some have questions about the Scriptures that enumerate “God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit,” or, as in Oneness, who believe that baptism is only in the name of Jesus. What the Bible does say is, “Go baptize in the name of Yeshua haMashiach,” Jesus the Christ, or the Messiah, the anointed one. But if there is only one God, who is the Father? God. Who is the Holy Spirit? God. Who Is the Son? God. This is just Hebrew synonymous parallelisms. Go out and do this in the name of the totality of all that God is. The emphasis is not even upon Jesus, Jesus Christ, or Father, Son, Holy Spirit, but upon the word “name.” Why? Because “name” signifies authority. Go out in the name of the One who is the King of Kings, who lives within, whom I serve, and who empowers me as His messenger to go out and literally be kingdom in this world.
The principal message that Jesus proclaimed was kingdom. When His disciples came and asked Him to teach them to pray, Jesus taught them, “Our Father which inhabits the heavenlies, holy be your name. Let your kingdom go, be spread, over all the earth in such a way that God will begin to rule and reign in more and more lives, so that men and women will begin to do here on earth the will of the Father, just as it is being done in heaven.” That is what God wants to do – reign in our lives, empower our lives. God wants to fill us in order that we might be whole, not just that we might be whole, but that our wholeness will bring others to wholeness.
What is the purpose of our existence? Why are we here? That we might be the reflection of the one who lives and dwells within us. We have missed the point and gone so far afield that Christianity is reduced to Sunday and Wednesday church. Much of what we do must certainly seem to be odd to God when He said to go, and to take the authority over the devil and see him flee, and to lay our hands on the sick and see them recover and say to them, ““The kingdom of God has come upon you.” That is, you have seen God burst through this space-time continuum and He has met you at the very point of your human need. Go and minister to those that are sick, those that are hungry, those that are naked, those that are homeless, those that are in prison. The action for the man and woman of God is out there. God is more concerned with what we do with our fellowman, and the relationship we have with our fellowman, than He is about our relationship vertically with HIM. It may start in your head, but it ends in your heart.
What was the purpose in Jesus’ coming? That we might be made whole. And the purpose in our existence, our being, our going out to minister? That man might be made whole. Can man have his part in the world to come without a knowledge of Jesus? Man can have a part in the world to come even without very much of an understanding of God, but we have to understand that biblical faith is not a religion of tomorrow, not an “otherworldly” religion, but a religion of today. I need, for today, all of God that there is, everything that I can know about God, everything I can understand about God, in order that not just I can be made whole, but that I can be an instrument or a vehicle through whom God works to bring others into wholeness.
There is so much, so many questions, so many answers, yet, our prayer must be that the Spirit of God quickens our minds and understanding and helps us to receive those answers that have not yet become evident, that the Spirit of God will lead us into truth. Above all it should be our heart’s desire that we might come before God with a renewed resolve to be everything that we have the capacity to be with God in us, and that we focus our attention out there to a world that is hurting, a world that is lost, to a world that needs God. Rather than arguing and discussing, fussing, rather than contending and factionalizing the family of God, that we might focus not on our differences, but on that which we have in common, namely, that there is a God in heaven who loves and who cares and who wants to see His people whole. And that we might become an instrument through which God works to effect wholeness in this world, today, in the now. That the anointing of the Spirit of God will rest upon us all; dwell within us all, and flow through us all, to effect wholeness, by the power of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords who lives within us and whom we serve.
This two-part article is presented basically as it was delivered, in lecture form, without supportive materials, references, footnotes, etc. However, documentation for statements made in this article can be found in The Encyclopedia Judaica, Keter Publishing; Bereishis, Artscroll Series, Volume 1 Mesorah Publishing; Everyman’s Talmud, Schocken Books; Brown-Driver-Briggs-Gesenius Hebrew-English Lexicon, Hendrickson Publishing; and Jastrow’s Dictionary Judaica.
