2025 AUGUST 03
OUT OF EGYPT I CALLED MY SON - Hosea 11:1-4
When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. The more I called them, the more they went from me; they kept sacrificing to the Baals and offering incense to idols. Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk; I took them up in my arms, but they did not know that I healed them. I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love. I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks. I bent down to them and fed them. "
Jesus' Divine Sonship was carved into marble, which notion during the last 17 centuries became an untouchable monolith. Marble, however, is not the best material when it comes to the living, for it serves better the lifeless monuments in the mausoleums or in the museums. In the modern world, which began with James Watt's steam powered engine hailing from 1776, the Divine Sonship of Jesus, itself, also began to evaporate into the realm of mythology.
This evaporation has been exacerbated by Stephenson's Locomotive built in New Castle, England, in 1829, and it was further pushed into oblivion by the invention of the Maxim machine gun in 1884, evolving humanity from the modern age of the cast iron into the second industrial revolution of the steel, submerged in the two world wars.
The third industrial revolution, which brought the postmodern era with its nuclear and space programs, exiled the notion of the Divine Sonship of Jesus to the Theological Seminaries, often explicitly persecuted by atheist or just hostile military dictatorships.
Nonetheless, in the ancient time mythology was like factual reality for people, and the presence of the gods and demigods were a part of the everyday life. Demigods, by definition, were the individuals, who had a god or a semi-god among one’s parents.
In the ancient eyes it was the normalcy, that gods merry each other or even humans, or just having love affairs. In ancient Greece they believed, that Perseus was the son of the god Zeus, begotten, when her mother Danae, the daughter of the King of Argos, was visited by Zeus in the form of a shower of Gold.
Heracles, one of the most famous demigod or deified hero of Greece, was an other son of Zeus from a mortal woman, called Alcmene. The legendary singer Orpheus was the son of the sun god Apollo and Calliope, though the early sources stated that his father might have been a contemporary Thracian King. Theseus, the hero who slew the Minotaur, the half man and half bull, in the Island of Crete, and was the son of Poseidon, the god of the sea. In the Greek mythology there were hundreds of gods, and hundreds or more demigods filling the human imagination and the everyday life.
Thus, in the ancient world the society was accustomed with half-bred humans, having divinity inherited from one of their parents. Almost all the ancient societies in the world accepted their existence, from the heroes of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, to the Indian Epic of Mahabharata, or even the Iliad and Odyssey.
Nonetheless, there was definitely one ancient tribal structure on Earth, which categorically opposed the divinity of humans and the very existence of demigods, and even the gods in the plural.
This tribal structure was Israel. To sell Jesus to the Jews as a the Son of the only God, was an impossible task, because for the Jews it was the absolute blasphemy. However, to the Greek this was not only habitual, but more than necessary.
To elevate Jesus’ Greek styled pedigree in the Greek World must have been unavoidable, because Jesus must have become the ultimate GREEK Superhero, the Savior of not only a town or a city but the whole world. He had to compete with the whole Greek mythological Pantheon.
His Greek styled elevation began with the Apostle Paul, as he wrote to the Philippians, chapter 2 that “Christ Jesus, … didn’t consider his equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death,... Therefore God also highly exalted him, and gave to him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, those on earth, and those under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. ”
This statement was made for the Greek, and was totally unacceptable for the Jews, therefore real Jewish converts to Christianity were very rare. Consequently, Apostle Paul was excommunicated from the synagogues, thus he turned to the gentiles with his preaching.
However, astonishingly, the Hebrew Scriptures talks directly and literally about the Son of God. In the Book of Exodus, chapter 4, God told Moses, that “You shall tell Pharaoh, ‘God says, Israel is my son, my firstborn; and I have said to you, Let my son go, that he may serve me.’ ”
Prophet Jeremiah declared it to the world, “that they will come with weeping. I will lead them with petitions. I will cause them to walk by rivers of waters, in a straight way in which they won’t stumble; for I am a father to Israel. Ephraim is my firstborn.”
We just also read it in the Book of Hosea, as well, that “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.”
The Hebrew sages said that a wise elder represents a community, but the true prophet is the manifestation of the whole nation. According to modern Religion Science, elevating Jesus to the rank of a Greek demigod, and later a Greek god, by deification, was the very Greek thing of doing.
In the ancient Jewish mindset, the true prophet is embodying the whole nation, which nation is literally the firstborn son of God, ergo the national prophet, or the ultimate prophet is the firstborn son of God, ex officio. It is even in the Gospel, that Caiaphas, the High Priest, prophesied, that “do you consider that it is advantageous for us that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation not perish.”
It is even more astonishing, that, when in Jerusalem, they accused Jesus with the explicit blasphemy, that he makes himself God, claiming the Sonship of God for himself, Jesus quoted them the Book of the Psalms, 84:6, that God said: “You are gods, all of you are sons of the Most High.” This also means, that we are all children of God the most High, how can anyone think that God is not his or our Father?
It is even much much more astonishing, in the Gospel of John, chapter 14, Jesus declares that “the Father who lives in me does his works… most certainly I tell you, he who believes in me, the works that I do, he will do also; and he will do greater works than these, because I am going to my Father.” Of course his Father is our Father, as well, exactly, as we pray.
It means that God’s presence, the Spirit dwells in EVERY human heart. WHEN, that presence fills the heart completely by overrunning it, that is the ultimate human purpose and the ultimate miracle.
That is what happened to Jesus, he became completely filled with the Holy Spirit, and that is his message to us:
Come and follow me, accept God’s presence in your hearts, obey the Grandfather Spirit in your heart, do the commandments, declare God’s kingship over wicked Emperors and over the whole universe, and we will have a share in the life eternal.
AMEN
