How Can God Die?
Muslims and Hebrews criticize the cross by asking, “how can God die”? Essentially, only one part of God died–the expression of God fused to a human body. The ‘Word’ of God that inhabited his soul was taken back to God and ‘rehoused’ in a higher kind of body. At death the consciousness of the soul is transferred to the spirit realm through our spirit. And if we doubt that Jesus was supposed to die to pay for sins we only need to read the prophecy of Isaiah 53, written about 700 years prior.
The Trinity: Thought, Word, Deed
After many years of asking God to reveal the trinity to me, an understanding arrived in my heart. I have since heard of others who have used the same imagery.
This is the analogy: there are three activities that demonstrate our character–thought, word and deed. Similarly, God the Father can be thought of as the one who initiates thought, the Word of God is the expression of God, and the Spirit of God carries out those plans. God’s Spirit works invisibly, without fail. Therefore the Word and Spirit are agents of the Father, and bring their own personality to their activities.
When Jesus was born he was probably as naive as any other child, but because he was not a son of Adam, he did not possess a rebellious nature. He was fully possessed by the Word of God, although his mind needed to mature and learn discipline like a normal person before he could be ready to carry out his mission, hence the 40 days of fasting.
Was Jesus’ earthly body a part of God? We don’t have the answer to that, but it makes sense to think of his soul and spirit as God, and yet the soul cannot be separated from the body as part of the soul is formed by the brain. But we must be careful when we call Jesus ‘God’, because people might get the impression that Jesus was the entirety of God. God was still both in heaven and also everywhere at once through his spirit–as he has always been. Its better to say Jesus was a ‘part’ of God. “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.” (2Cor 5:19) So when Jesus died a part of God stopped operating in this dimension, but his soul was immediately transported to a higher dimension, just like our soul when we die. Only his body died, but his body was later transformed and taken to heaven.
How could God allow such a travesty of justice against such a good man? That was the whole point, it fulfilled Isaiah 53.
The Catholic description of Mary as ‘the mother of God’ is blasphemous; certainly she took care of him, but Jesus was a new creation; his divine body and divine soul or identity as the Word came directly from God. ‘Mother of Christ’ is more accurate.
I am not teaching Nestorianism, which was condemned at the council of Ephesus in 430AD. “Nestorius’ opponents found his teaching too close to the heresy of ‘adoptionism’ – the idea that Christ had been born a man who had later been “adopted” as God’s son.” It makes more sense to believe that all of Jesus was always God’s son; his body was a special creation and his soul was the Word of God. Yet it still clearer for Muslims and other when we call Jesus a “part of God” rather that just saying “Jesus is God”. After all, the only time in the Bible anyone said Jesus is God was Thomas when he said, “My Lord and my God.”