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Could you please tell me if you believe when Jesus was first here on earth if he was in flesh or spirit and if he is the same flesh as God his father? Also if you think we are at the end of times and that all prophocies until today have been true and correct to the bible? As it states in the bible it says when Jerusalem is made a nation it is told that the time is near. Jerusalem was made a nation in 1948 but it wasnt signed until 1967. Does that put it as our time up in 2007?
Requested by Shihata and Answered by Fr. Antonios Kaldas on 01-Oct-2007 12:39 (2828 reads)
This is actually two questions wrapped up in one package!

Could you please tell me if you believe when Jesus was first here on earth if he was in flesh or spirit and if he is the same flesh as God his father?

Strictly speaking, the first time Jesus was here on earth was when He created it! If you read the first verses of both Genesis and the Gospel of John, you will find that the Word, or Logos, God the Son, the Second Hypostasis of the Holy Trinity, was there at the creation, and "all things were made through Him, and without Him, nothing was made that was made". This includes, of course, the earth. Genesis has God referring to Himself in the plural ("we"), usually taken to indicate the three hypostases of the Holy Trinity were involved in the action of Creation.

It is thought that some visions in the Old Testament were "pre-incarnation" manifestations of God the Son. For example, when the Three Youths are cast into the fiery furnace in the Book of Daniel, they are protected because "one like a Son of Man" appears next to them. Many interpreters believe this was actually Jesus.

However, when Jesus was born in Bethlehem, this was a totally unique miracle. This was not a vision, or an illusion, or merely an appearance that could be quickly dissolved. It was the Son actually taking flesh and becoming a real live, breathing, eating, thirsting, crying and suffering human being, just like us.

In this sense, the Son actually did something the Father never did - become a human being. He told us that "God is Spirit" (John ch4) and God told Moses that no one could see Him and live. The Father has no flesh, as you say in your question. He is pure Spirit (whatever that may mean - it is beyond our experience or comprehension).

Interestingly, it is the Mormons who believe that God the Father actually is a man of flesh and blood, with a long white beard and long white hair. Among other things, they believe he was once a normal human being living on another planet somewhere in this universe, and that his reward for being very good was that when he died, he was given his own planet to be "god" of, by all the other gods. he thus came to St Mary and fathered Jesus through natural sexual relations. Needless to say, this has nothing whatsoever to do with what the Bible teaches, although it is fiction of a very high degree of imagination!

You haven't been talkling to some Mormons recently, have you?

I will answer the other question above as a separate question.