Overview

Note: This presentation dives deep into the existence of our Abba Father and pre-incarnate Jesus in the Old Testament. It is complicated, but I believe it will grow your faith. It involves an effort most believers are not used to. Every believer can benefit from it. We are using NKJV in Chapter 4 to get the “LORD” translation of Yahweh. Burn Yahweh into your hearts when you see LORD.

The first three chapters presented the world we live in, both supernatural and physical. The following two chapters present the Kingdom of God, our world’s owner, and ruler. We referenced the Kingdom in S2M6; it has a ruler and the ruler’s Family. We can choose to be a subject in the Kingdom with ELB and God the King or an adopted child in the Family with our Abba Father, his begotten Son, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Please pray on that choice. I choose the Family relationship and strongly recommend you choose it too.

We will walk through the Family features, but first, we look at the question, who do we worship, Jesus or our Abba Father? The answer typically comes from the doctrine embraced by the church we attend and leave it at that. I don’t want to step on that, my focus is on the Scripture, and the Holy Spirit will guide us to the answer. Either choice keeps you out of the fiery pit, but only the Family choice provides the full peace, joy, and glory created by our Abba Father. Please pray on that.

ELB tends to focus on God in the Old Testament and Jesus in the New Testament; that is obvious. We often hear that the Old Testament points to Jesus, and then he arrives in the New Testament. But the Holy Three always was and always will be. Pre-incarnate Jesus and the Holy Spirit work closely with our Abba Father in the Old Testament and work together in the New Testament.

We are taught the Old Testament points to the Messiah who is coming, but that is the job, not Jesus himself. And our Abba father is not an Old Testament relic; he is always there. He is there the whole time, and our faith grows to know that.

Also, remember that Jesus came for the first time to do a job and ascended. Scholars put too much emphasis on his past at the expense of the future. The historical focus on Jesus and what he did for us goes too far in ELB and almost completely misses the Holy Spirit. Whether one believes the Holy Spirit is a “person” or not, he still did what the Scripture says he did in all the Holy Bible versions. That is what matters.

Our life is about Jesus coming back with a new world, which must be our focus. Our redemption is in his visit; our life is in his return. When I share this with my flock, it resonates with them. We must focus on that connection today and tomorrow, not the past, to escape ELB. I suggest you think about that and pray on it.

When we base our relationship on the past and what Jesus did, it focuses on this life on earth. My observation does not diminish what Jesus did; it is about lifting our Abba Father to his rightful glorious, majestic position, which is orders of magnitude greater than earth-life. Paul still teaches 1 Corinthians 10:31, “So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.” He is not talking about Jesus, or he would have said so.

Look at John 17:1-3, “Jesus spoke these words, lifted up His eyes to heaven, and said: “Father, the hour has come. Glorify Your Son, that Your Son also may glorify You, as You have given Him authority over all flesh, that He should give eternal life to as many as You have given Him. And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.” Please burn the last line into your heart with the word “both.”

When John saw the Revelation of the end time, it was a vision thousands of years into the future, and our Abba Father is still on the throne. Jesus will come, open the scroll, and finish what he started. Until then, our Abba Father is still ruling the throne.

Revelation 1:4-6, “Grace to you and peace from Him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven Spirits who are before His throne, and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead, and the ruler over the kings of the earth. To Him who loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood, and has made us kings and priests to His God and Father, to Him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.“

Revelation 4, “After these things I looked, and behold, a door standing open in heaven . . . Immediately I was in the Spirit; and behold, a throne set in heaven, and One sat on the throne . . . And from the throne proceeded lightnings, thunderings, and voices. Seven lamps of fire were burning before the throne, which are the seven Spirits of God . . . The four living creatures . . . do not rest day or night, saying: “Holy, holy, holy, LORD God Almighty, Who was and is and is to come!”

Our Abba Father and the Son are a team. Jesus is the ruler of “the kings of the earth.” Stay with the Scripture; it never leads you astray (as originally written). Bask in it, make it your own, and live it. Doing that for you is not my job. My job is to help you do it for yourself.

The Answer

We previously raised the question, “what” is our Abba Father? An answer to the question seems essential to bring him to life in the fullest possible vision. The vision is critical because we need to build it from Scripture and the Holy Spirit. We look at “who” is our Abba Father in the context of our relationship. The word “who” is personal, and “what” is intellectual. This chapter reveals how he uses his names to relate to us, with Yahweh being his relationship name and his migration from there to being our Father, our Abba Father.

I pushed back against the doctrine of the 3-in-1 God in S2M6. ELB wants to conflate “What” is God into one impersonal, unrelatable bundle. That tunes us out of much of what the Scripture says about who and what is our Abba Father.

I only want to know what he is if I can further energize my love and obedience. Notice I said to “energize my love and obedience,” not pass a Holy Bible quiz. In Ephesians 4, our Abba Father is our Family’s Patriarch, the seat of all knowledge and power. He has a relational name, Yahweh, and an impersonal title name, also a spirit type, elohiym.

The journey from elohiym to God to the “magic 3 in oneness” is an ELB journey that results in weak faith. Our Abba Father gave us the word “elohiym,” and he used it for his divine spirit creations. What our Abba Father gave us is fantastic. What man did after that is typical of man, confusing at best, and often misdirected in ELB. Jesus is the Son, given all authority on earth. That requires two beings.

Look at Colossians 2:8, “For in Him dwells all the fullness of the deity bodily; and you are complete in Him, who is the head of all principality and power.” Notice we are complete in Jesus. And yet, Jesus taught us to pray to the Father, and I find that profound.

I leave the Holy Spirit discussion to S4M5, but knowing the Holy Three in the fullness of the Scripture does not leave any room for the magical conflated 3-in-1 doctrine as the answer to “what is our Abba Father?” The Holy Spirit is the Holy Spirit, never seen in the likeness of a human. He commandeers a couple of humans, but that is not the same.

Imago Dei

“What” are Abba Father is relative to us starts with Genesis 1:26, “Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness.” ELB wants us to focus on the “image and likeness” and skip the “us” and “our.” That passage has puzzled me for a long time because my first question was, who is our Abba Father talking to? The “Us” in Genesis 1:26 is evidence of the Holy Three; they are all part of the creation process. But the “Us” has nothing to do with elohiym being singular and plural, as many say in ELB.

So, who is God talking to? Nowhere in the Scripture do the Holy Three talk to each other, except for human Jesus praying and talking to his Abba Father. Our Abba Father continuously talks through the other two in the Old Testament. Everything comes from the Father; what is there to talk about? John 5:19, “Then answered Jesus and said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise.” If the Holy Three already know everything; what is there to talk about with each other? Jesus does not know when he is coming; they all do not know everything.

In the previous chapter, we saw our Abba Father’s world; his divine spirit family surrounds him. The nahas heard our Abba Father talking to Adam in Eden. The nahas was not happy about the creation of man and woman, and the rest is history. I see the “us” and “our” as the divine spirit world surrounding our Abba Father and to who he is talking. That conversation took place in Eden. Conventional teaching that the Holy Three are only talking to each other completely ignores the divine spirit family we know exists. That is ELB.

My seminary project was the “Imago Dei,” as scholars call the “image of God,” as if Latin was our Abba Father’s language. I thought the Imago Dei had to contain some secret sauce that would change the world if we only knew. I searched high and low and found no secret sauce.

I found attributes and features we share with the Holy Three. The next topic reviews what scholars say and what the Scripture says, but they omit the essential feature in our relationship. Look at 2 Corinthians 4:4, “. . . that the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. . . .” Christ is the image of God. We are made “in” that image.

Our Abba Father is introducing us to his divine spirit Family in Genesis 1:26, and our image that matters is the divine spirit nature that connects us to him. Our soul, our spirit thing, and our GCS are all ignored by ELB. Please pray on that; it is a huge faith builder. Our divine “spirit only” siblings around our Abba Father don’t have what we have, but we have what they have in the spirit connection to our Abba Father. He is talking to them at the moment and to us in the Scripture.

Ancient Hebrew did not have capital letters. The ESV, NIV, and many other translations do not capitalize the “our” as the KJV and ASV do, leading us to “God.” The lowercase “our” can easily include the other spirit beings, such as the nahas, the angels, and the bene elohiym, etc., as the audience addressed. That builds my faith.

What that all means to our faith is this book’s title, “Wow, I want what they have!” Made in “our image and likeness,” means being people others see and want for themselves. The first commandment was against idols because of us. We are his living idols; we are everything an idol pretends, except we are real. And everything we do away from our Abba Father is an idol, not just a sin. Have you ever thought there was no commandment against sin? That is ELB. The first commandment is about our sin, but his cleverness makes it what we do, not who we are.

Attributes

ELB strives to minimize our divine spirit image, so it focuses on earthly human “attributes” to define what the Imago Dei means. The attributes of our Abba Father are typical doctrine presentations such as thinking, loving, etc. And they leave me flat with no inspiration at all.

There is one attribute word about our Abba Father that does work, “transcendent.” That is useful with minimal ELB. Transcendent means “beyond the limits of ordinary experience.” That is an attribute worthy of our Abba Father. When talking about our Abba Father’s attributes, they should be worthy of his majesty AND sourced from the Scripture.

Immutable

Immutable is a favorite descriptor of our Holy Three. It means they cannot change, not just that they don’t. Malachi 3:6, “For I am the Yahweh, I do not change.” He doesn’t change because he is Yahweh. He already is everything, what is there to change? That means we can depend on his promises for good and punishment, which is also suitable for our good. But when we define our Abba Father with immutable in ELB, believers see it as a sternness without love and miss the transformation from the Old Testament to the New Testament relationship.

While our Abba Father does not change, his plan for us evolves with many changes. The plan starts with a family to birth more people, then a specific family, Abraham and the way of Yahweh. Then a nation of God with priests, judges, kings, and prophets. Then Jesus does his work, and we have the Body of Christ as the church. The law is transformed into love with Jesus’ work, and we are brought back into his Family for eternity. That is a lot of change only seen in the entire Scripture and not seen in ELB’s attempt to define our Abba Father in ways that minimize him.

The Three Omni’s

We referenced the set of “omni-” words (omni means “all”) in S2M5. The first is omniscient, which means “the state of having total knowledge, the quality of knowing everything.” Psalm 139 is our Abba Father’s own words. Let’s use them instead. “O Yahweh, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising; Thou understandest my thought afar off. Thou searchest out my path and my lying down, And art acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word in my tongue, But, lo, O Yahweh, thou knowest it altogether. Thou hast beset me behind and before, And laid thy hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; It is high, I cannot attain unto it. Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?” Hopefully, you can see the difference in our hearts between man’s words and our Abba Father’s words.

The second word, omnipresent, is a doctrine favorite defined as “present everywhere at all times.” It makes sense that with knowing everything, the Holy Three must be present everywhere, including hell. Everywhere means the divine spirit world as well as material earth. Believers in ELB tend to leave the divine spirit world out of this subject .

Colossians 1:15-18 is informative, “who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him were all things created, in the heavens and upon the earth, things visible and things invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things have been created through him, and unto him; and he is before all things, and in him all things consist. And he is the head of the body, the church: who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he might have the preeminence.“

That passage talks about Jesus. “All things formed through him” reinforces how our Abba Father works through Jesus, the Word. Gravity is a force between all physical bodies, and it is easy to see how Jesus could hold all things together as gravity does. Please bring that thought to life.

Jeremiah 32:17 belongs with the above verse, “Ah Lord Yahweh! behold, thou hast made the heavens and the earth by thy great power and by thine outstretched arm; there is nothing too hard for thee.” That passage also supports the image of our Abba Father working through his Son and Holy Spirit, even though it does not mention them.

Omnipotent is the third common doctrine word. It means “all-powerful,” but I cannot even think about that word because I want to experience the full majesty of the Scripture. Look at the creation, look at his Son, look at the Holy Spirit, look at the Revelation, look at our Abba Father’s love and patience, look at it all and bask in its glory and how blessed we are to be even a tiny part of it, let alone, to help rule the new world. Thank you, Abba Father, Jesus, and Holy Spirit!

Self-sufficient

“Self-sufficient, he has no needs” is on most godly attribute lists. While that may be technically possible, it is not helpful. Our Abba Father cannot praise himself, and he wants praise. Praise is the missing ingredient in our prayer, and praise is when the hair on our arms stands up in prayer. “Thousands of thousands circle the throne saying, holy, holy, holy.”

The second thing our Abba Father needs is our acceptance of Jesus as Lord and Savior. He also needs us to obey him in love. His definition of love is obedience. He also needs us to build the church, preach the gospel, and help others come to him. The “self-sufficient” doctrine leaves us with an aloof God in ELB, which is not helpful to our faith.

Wise

Our Abba Father is “wise,” another attribute often listed. He created everything; he is not wise, he is amazing beyond our comprehension. Other attributes often listed are faithful, good, just, merciful, gracious, and glorious. These are all ELB terms designed to bring our Abba Father down to earth. They are all passive to us as we sit and take them in. They do not inspire us to do anything; they maintain a status quo. Our Abba Father is so much bigger than any of these words. Please pray on that.

Communicable Attributes

Communicable means something that can be transmitted or communicated. I do not believe scholars understand “communicable” attributes, so I am not going to discuss a list of them as scholars do in ELB. Most studies list 6-10 attributes we then look at and agree with. ELB wants us to feel wrong about weak shared attributes, not weak faith, so we work on attributes, not our faith.

Believers are not called in Scripture anywhere to compare attributes we share with our Abba Father. As believers, we are called to sanctify our lives and glorify our Abba Father. We imitate Jesus, follow him, and learn from him. We do this through our GCS connection. The Holy Spirit and the Scripture will teach us everything we need to know. In addition, we receive gifts, not attributes, to do our job in the Family business. Our Abba Father provides everything and knits us in the womb as a unique creation for his purpose. A list of attributes we supposedly share with our Abba Father falls flat because they are a variable within people. We all have different attributes to do our job and fulfill our calling. We need to focus on our calling, not random attributes. Please pray on that.