10-05-2006, 04:40 AM
27. He answered: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind' ; and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' "
28. "You have answered correctly," Jesus replied. "Do this and you will live."
this is how he is giving eternal life, but showing and teaching the way to attain salvation.
So as you can see, Jesus in the NT is clearly not ‘giving eternal life by himself’ but showing the way to inherit it.
Wow, that is totally not what's going on in that passage. Jesus is definitely NOT teaching that good works are a means to salvation. He's showing, in this passage, how impossible it is to attain salvation by works. These laws have to be followed perfectly in order to gain salvation, which they are not. By anyone.
You see, he does nothing of his own. He does the will of the Father, which is the will of the Son, because they are one. Because they are one God.
As regards your quote from Scripture on how to gain eternal life...that's the problem. In order to get eternal life, you have to follow that perfectly. You have to follow all the laws that God has ever given perfectly to the letter. The trouble is that nobody outside of God himself would ever be able to do that. Only God, with his perfection, would ever be able to keep God's law. Everyone else is lacking. If your salvation is dependent on you keeping that law, then you're in trouble. Jesus in that passage was showing the futility of trying to do enough good works to impress God. He had given that man a list of demands so big that he couldn't possibly meet them.
And is that what salvation rests on? Stuff we can't do? I certainly hope not.
And God the Father is greater than God the Son due to the state of humiliation that God the Son placed himself in during his time on Earth. That's why he gives the Father so much credit all the time. Jesus, as God on earth, could have changed the fibre of existence, could have ensured that he'd be freed from the cross, but did not. Because he was in a state of humiliation, as the willing atonement. The Father, in Heaven, was not in a state of humiliation, therefore, before the resurrection, Jesus had to perform miracles through license of his father, but after the resurrection, once the atonement was completed, the miracles were of his own.
And to flip things around somewhat, I'd like to talk about the Qu'ran, if I may. Because in there, Jesus makes some clay birds, and gives them life, and they fly away. That, in my book, is called creation. And who does that? That is more than healing, or speaking truth, or raising the dead. That is giving life to the lifeless, forming something out of dust, and breathing life into it. I know it says "By God's leave" he did that, but my goodness...can anyone else in creation create? Can anyone in the system of the world use it like that? I would doubt it, but if you like, you can say that he was so favoured by God that HE COULD CREATE LIFE FROM NOTHING.
If that doesn't show divine power, then what does? He's making life from nothing.