I was listening to this sermon this morning as I was getting ready for work, and there were a few things I wanted to address that just don't sit right.
Agape Kingdom Fellowship sermon - "On the Trinity - Part 1"
- Thread starter JudgeRightly
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Most of the sermon was fine, but the parts I take issue with are the following (and some of this might be better suited for a thread in the Creation Science section of TOL).
At timestamp 18:55, Gordon claims that Jesus was going to go to Hell. This was discussed here, but to summarize, NO! Jesus was NOT going to Hell. He went to Paradise, to preach to the righteous dead.
At timestamp 22:30, Gordon claims (indirectly) that "God does not know the extant future. The "extant" part is the problem here. The future does not exist, therefore God cannot know it. The solution is therefore that God is omnicompetent, that He is able to bring about that which He plans to do, and that He is smart enough and capable enough to respond to the actions of sinful men in order to do so. An infallibly known future is a settled future, by definition. Such is incompatible with the concept of men having wills that are separate (autonomous) from God. The premise that the future is extant is wrong, and thus the rest of the claim is moot. An in-depth discussion on God's omniscience can be found here.
At timestamp 23:16, Gordon claims to believe that the Trinity (the individual Persons of the triune Godhead) did not exist prior to (or at least, shortly before) the beginning of the creation. The first major problem with this is that Jesus explicitly states the following:
And now, O Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was.
www.biblegateway.com
Jesus did exist before the world existed.
The Son and the Holy Spirit were not created, at all. Period. To say that they were is itself heresy of the highest order!
With that out of the way, I'm hoping that Gordon simply misspoke, and meant to say "formed," which has a different meaning (and is in fact a different word than the word for "created" in the ancient Hebrew language).
If that is the case, then I can agree. Prior to the creation of the world, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, fellowshipped with one another as one God in three Persons.
At the creation, God made an image for His Son to indwell, and then created man in that image. (Something Bob Enyart taught, though I'm open to correction on this.)
As for the Holy Spirit being formed, we see the Spirit hovering over the face of the waters in Genesis 1:2, but no mention of the Father or Son.
But no, the two were not created. They have always existed within the Godhead.
At timestamp 24:53, Gordon claims that all of creation "resides somewhere inside of God," because "there is no 'outside of God'." He then states, "God the Father doesn't, or at least did not, reside anywhere -- He just IS," which I agree with, but then he said: "He is everything." This is heresy.
God is not everything.
If someone makes the claim "all cars are red," then all you need to disprove the claim is to find one blue car.
The claim "God is everything" is falsified by the fact that God is NOT sin (the blue car in the analogy).
Therefore, God is not everything! And to claim that He is is blasphemy!
At timestamp 26:06, Gordon says, "You have a hard time in your mind thinking, 'space can't go on forever, but it has to, right? How could it go on forever?'"
The answer is not some mystery or incomprehensible illogicality.
The answer is that space simply doesn't exist. It is not an ontological thing. God did not create space (or time for that matter) when He created the heavens and the earth.
Space is simply a construct of human language that we use to describe the physical relationship between two objects in terms of distance.
Space is not part of creation, because there's nothing to create. Space is void. Nothingness. "Nothing" cannot be created because it is the ABSENCE of "something."
The only reality is the one we live in. Multiple "dimensions" is science fiction, not fact.
Heaven is "above" us. It is where God lives, thus, "outside" the known universe is probably a good way of describing its location in relation to our universe. (And Hell is "below" us, probably within the earth itself, if it had a physical location.) Suffice it to say that spiritual locations aren't on this physical plane of existence.
Regarding 27:30, God created earth to be a paradise. It was literally called "Heaven."
After the Fall, God moved where He lived (supra) to a place "above" earth, and took the Tree of Life with Him (it was not destroyed in the flood, and is seen in Revelation at the End).
Note that the Garden of Eden is sometimes referred to as Heaven. It's possible that God moved the garden itself off of earth, but I'm not beholden to that idea.
But no, God did not create a separate heaven from Earth at the beginning, because Earth WAS Heaven.
Regarding 29:27, space, location, distance, none of these things have meaning outside of a thinking mind. Space did not exist forever, because it is only a concept that only exists within a thinking mind.
That's all I will address in this post. I may address more later
At timestamp 18:55, Gordon claims that Jesus was going to go to Hell. This was discussed here, but to summarize, NO! Jesus was NOT going to Hell. He went to Paradise, to preach to the righteous dead.
At timestamp 22:30, Gordon claims (indirectly) that "God does not know the extant future. The "extant" part is the problem here. The future does not exist, therefore God cannot know it. The solution is therefore that God is omnicompetent, that He is able to bring about that which He plans to do, and that He is smart enough and capable enough to respond to the actions of sinful men in order to do so. An infallibly known future is a settled future, by definition. Such is incompatible with the concept of men having wills that are separate (autonomous) from God. The premise that the future is extant is wrong, and thus the rest of the claim is moot. An in-depth discussion on God's omniscience can be found here.
At timestamp 23:16, Gordon claims to believe that the Trinity (the individual Persons of the triune Godhead) did not exist prior to (or at least, shortly before) the beginning of the creation. The first major problem with this is that Jesus explicitly states the following:
And now, O Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was.
Bible Gateway passage: John 17:5 - New King James Version
And now, O Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was.
Jesus did exist before the world existed.
The Son and the Holy Spirit were not created, at all. Period. To say that they were is itself heresy of the highest order!
With that out of the way, I'm hoping that Gordon simply misspoke, and meant to say "formed," which has a different meaning (and is in fact a different word than the word for "created" in the ancient Hebrew language).
If that is the case, then I can agree. Prior to the creation of the world, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, fellowshipped with one another as one God in three Persons.
At the creation, God made an image for His Son to indwell, and then created man in that image. (Something Bob Enyart taught, though I'm open to correction on this.)
As for the Holy Spirit being formed, we see the Spirit hovering over the face of the waters in Genesis 1:2, but no mention of the Father or Son.
But no, the two were not created. They have always existed within the Godhead.
At timestamp 24:53, Gordon claims that all of creation "resides somewhere inside of God," because "there is no 'outside of God'." He then states, "God the Father doesn't, or at least did not, reside anywhere -- He just IS," which I agree with, but then he said: "He is everything." This is heresy.
God is not everything.
If someone makes the claim "all cars are red," then all you need to disprove the claim is to find one blue car.
The claim "God is everything" is falsified by the fact that God is NOT sin (the blue car in the analogy).
Therefore, God is not everything! And to claim that He is is blasphemy!
At timestamp 26:06, Gordon says, "You have a hard time in your mind thinking, 'space can't go on forever, but it has to, right? How could it go on forever?'"
The answer is not some mystery or incomprehensible illogicality.
The answer is that space simply doesn't exist. It is not an ontological thing. God did not create space (or time for that matter) when He created the heavens and the earth.
Space is simply a construct of human language that we use to describe the physical relationship between two objects in terms of distance.
Space is not part of creation, because there's nothing to create. Space is void. Nothingness. "Nothing" cannot be created because it is the ABSENCE of "something."
The only reality is the one we live in. Multiple "dimensions" is science fiction, not fact.
Heaven is "above" us. It is where God lives, thus, "outside" the known universe is probably a good way of describing its location in relation to our universe. (And Hell is "below" us, probably within the earth itself, if it had a physical location.) Suffice it to say that spiritual locations aren't on this physical plane of existence.
Regarding 27:30, God created earth to be a paradise. It was literally called "Heaven."
After the Fall, God moved where He lived (supra) to a place "above" earth, and took the Tree of Life with Him (it was not destroyed in the flood, and is seen in Revelation at the End).
Note that the Garden of Eden is sometimes referred to as Heaven. It's possible that God moved the garden itself off of earth, but I'm not beholden to that idea.
But no, God did not create a separate heaven from Earth at the beginning, because Earth WAS Heaven.
Regarding 29:27, space, location, distance, none of these things have meaning outside of a thinking mind. Space did not exist forever, because it is only a concept that only exists within a thinking mind.
That's all I will address in this post. I may address more later
Right Divider
Body part
I was a little bothered near the beginning when he was trying to say that God the Father and God the Holy Spirit were "not persons" but were "personalities" (but somehow God the Son was a person). That seems extremely convoluted and confused. Perhaps he was confusing "person" with "human".