all hail
18Jul07
Jesus stands in his resurrected body about to ascend into heaven in front of as many as 500 witnesses. Why does he tell them GO and STAY in the same breath?
Jesus stands in his resurrected body about to ascend into heaven in front of as many as 500 witnesses. Why does he tell them GO and STAY in the same breath?
Go tell the people in the city they live in, in the house that they live in, about Jesus Christ.
Because he is a paradox and he can say two different things yet they mean the same thing.
well, first on the paradox thing. in most cases that just means we don’t know. if we start teaching people that God is full of paradoxes, then anything can mean anything - and there’s no real solid ground for faith. most of the supposed paradoxes people come up with in the Bible have very simple explanations, if we’re willing to wait on God for his revelation.
i can tell you Jesus wasn’t speaking out of both sides of his mouth - he was actually saying “you need to go into all the world & preach the gospel, BUT FIRST you need to stay in jerusalem and wait for the promise of the Father.”
what i was asking is this - why was waiting for the promise of the Father so important?
Hey G.G. Wasn’t at all implying that Jesus was speaking out of both sides of his mouth. But as you stated, GO and STAY in the same breath can be seen as a contradiction by most. In Wikipedia the definition of a paradox: “A paradox is an apparently true statement or group of statements that leads to a contradiction or a situation which defies intuition.”
Jesus was saying Go into all the world, but in order to do that you must receive the promise of the Father, otherwise there is no point, cause you’d have nothing to really GO for if you don’t have the Father. It is also something that Jesus will do: speak something true but in order for you to take that truth in, you have to go deeper in Him.
Right - a paradox is seeming truth leading to a contradiction - where in this case we have an apparent contradiction leading to a deeper truth. The reason I run paradox and contradiction up the flagpole with a huge “WATCH OUT” is that every single thing that human reasoning identifies as a supposed God-paradox turns out to be a key to a deeper truth. What I would say is that any time we run into a statement in the Word that seems like a paradox or contradiction, we pray and wait for the deeper truth. There’s no need to sit there and try and untangle it intellectually. God reveals what we could never figure out.
The promise of the Father is the Holy Spirit. He is the Spirit of Truth, but he always does truth with power.