The Church Bride of Which Christ?

By Eric Halvorsen

In the beginnings of the church, there were struggles as leaders tried to understand how the Jesus, when He walked on the earth, could have been God and Man at the same time. Many different ideas were circulated causing division and persecution. Even during the life of John, the apostle, this was a problem. Finally, the church met and decided on a definitive solution to the problem. In reality, it was overthought, and the solution was not according to Scripture. The decision was reached in 451 at Chalcedon to declare that the historical Jesus was 100 percent God and 100 percent Man. All the mighty works He did were under the definition so reached as understandable because He moved using His inherent godly power. This decision was devastating to the common believer, and the Christian life became a totally human struggle. Jesus came with a mission from Father that was far more than dying on the cross for our sins. This book highlights the reason Jesus took on flesh and how understanding those reasons can transform the life of every believer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9781638853541

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The Church Bride of Which Christ?

Eric Halvorsen

ISBN 978-1-63885-353-4 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63885-354-1 (Digital)

Copyright © 2022 Eric Halvorsen

All rights reserved

First Edition

Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Covenant Books

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Table of Contents

Why Was Man Created?

How Can I Know?

Our Answer to How Can I Know?

The Promise

The Life

The Kingdom of Heaven

The Biblical Mission of the Church

The Church, Bride of Which Christ

The Humanity of the Historical Jesus

How Then Shall We Live?

Walking in the Spirit, the True Christian Experience

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

I thank Jesus for teaching me, encouraging me, and loving me through the process.

I thank my sweet wife, Lauraine, for her support and encouragement.

I thank my children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren for loving me through the process.

Introduction

The term Historical Jesus has been used by theologians and others to describe the period when Jesus was on the earth incarnated as one of us, a human. It covers the time from His birth in Bethlehem to His death in Jerusalem, about thirty-three years. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us is how John described it in his gospel. This incarnation of God in the flesh caused the people in that day to wonder. The Jews knew and hoped for the coming of the Messiah, hoping for deliverance from the Romans. He would be a King who would make Israel a great nation again as He established His forever Kingdom on the earth. The Messiah that actually came did not fit that mold, and yet there was the authoritative way He spoke and signs and wonders He performed that indicated He was more than just an ordinary man. The Pharisees and Sadducees were convinced that Jesus was not the Messiah but had great trouble opposing His influence on the people. The people tended not to be as much interested in the possibility of Jesus actually being the prophesied Messiah as they were of His healings and other works. The actual reception of Jesus as the Messiah seemed to be more a reality in those areas where there was a large contingent of Gentiles and even among the Samaritans. His own people could not recognize Him as the Messiah since He did not seem like a conquering hero.

Jesus asked His disciples who the people said He was (Matt. 16:13–18). Their reply was John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, or one of the other prophets. Then He asked His disciples who they said He was. Peter said, You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God. These were men who lived with Jesus for about three years. They had intimate knowledge of Who He was. They saw Him transfigured on the mountain and heard the Father declare how pleased He was in Jesus. They saw all His miracles starting with the creation of wine from water. They saw Him walk on water. They saw Him calm the storm and seas. Yet He was so human. They heard Jesus call Himself the Son of Man almost as an emphasis of His humanness. They saw Him angry in the temple at the money changers. They saw Him hungry. They did not spend their day worshipping at His feet. Instead they spent their day learning and watching and listening. They ate with Him. They slept by His side. They heard Him teach and interact with the people. They felt His rebuke at times like when they tried to keep the children from coming to Him or when Peter tried to contradict something He said.

Just when they thought they had Him figured out, they saw Him arrested, tried, beaten, nailed to a cross, and then saw Him die. This Man who Peter said was the Christ, the Son of the Living God died. So He was just a man. He died like a man. Two men died with him in the manner of men dying. Even though Jesus carefully prepared them with all the details of what would happen and that He would rise from the dead, there was the stark reality that He died. How could the Son of God die? How could God die?

Then while they were hiding from those who killed Jesus, the women came saying His body was gone and He had risen. They were told by the women to go to Galilee and He would meet them there.

In Galilee, they were in a room in fear of being next to be crucified and wondering about the appearance of Jesus promised to them. Suddenly He appeared in their midst, coming through closed doors in a new body that still bore the scars of the nails and the spear thrust.

Then, the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in the midst, and said to them, Peace be with you. When He had said this, He showed them His hands and His side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord. (John 20:19–20)

Then, after spending about forty days with the disciples, He ascended into heaven.

Jesus left the disciples to finish building His church, called in Scripture His body. Anyone who studies just a little of church history has to wonder at all the in-fighting, the abuses by the church, and the current situation of the church in general.

The people that God brought out of Egypt into the wilderness on their way to land promised to them by God to Abraham were told by Him that they were special to Him, and He gave them the Law at Mt. Sinai. That Law was basically a loving Father telling His beloved children how to live as His children and stop living the slave lifestyle. In Deuteronomy (after one generation had died in the wilderness for not trusting God), Moses tells the generation who would now go in that the Law, given by a loving Father, had been turned into a legalistic, heartless thing. They had missed the special relationship that they were being called to and the favored position Father was giving them. They had turned a relationship into a religion.

In my studies of church history and observance of churches today, I can safely say that the church through the years has struggled with the same problem.

This book is not about the symptoms of problems in the church, although they will be briefly touched on. This book is about the source of the problems in the church. The source is a question that raged in the early days of the church and was supposedly answered in the fifth century. It is the question that Jesus Himself asked, "Who do you say that I am?"

Jesus declared that He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

Jesus said to him, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me. (John 14:6)

He displayed the authority to say that. He lived and died, both verifiable historical facts. Then He rose from the dead to prove that what He came to do worked. That also is a verifiable fact.

So it then becomes important to answer the reality with a response.

Most people, I think, know in their hearts that Jesus is real, but responding to that fact is scary and causes a lifetime of excuses that in many cases end with a life unfulfilled and hopeless. For the purposes of this book, I am not going to debate the facts about Jesus and His time in history as a man. If you are really (and you should be) serious about Jesus, but want to know for sure, then there is much you can read about the facts or you can just ask Him to show you.

When I was grammar school age, I was taught in Sunday school that Jesus was my example. I accepted that as I heard stories about His life on earth. I was taught about the love He showed to people that He met and the things that He did for people. As I grew older, I found that the example got overshadowed by the doctrine of what He did and what that meant to me theologically. I struggled to make my life a Christian life but never could get the theological to be practical.

My father was a man who could do almost anything. Plumbing, electrical, carpentry, masonry, mechanical, and painting he could do. He was a quiet, purposed man who only believed in doing things right. I even wrote a paper about him in grammar school because of the tremendous example that he gave me. I would even say, rarely out loud, that I could never fill his shoes. I did not need to say it, but it was certainly in my heart. I grew up with that realization, and it became in me a feeling of not being able to measure up to the standard that my father had displayed to me.

I see a church struggling with the Christian life and trying to stay in the faith. They look at what they know about Jesus as an example that cannot be attained. That leads to an inner despair and frustration and the necessity to hold fast to a façade of Christianity. In addition, there is a looking at other Christians who are struggling the same way with perhaps more successful façades yet being discovered as hypocrites.

This is not how the church was begun by Jesus! The church is supposed to be the bride of Christ whom Jesus will present to Himself as spotless and blameless at the end.

To really understand the source of the problem, it is necessary to view the entire Bible as what we have heard it described by countless preachers, the Word of God. It takes reading the details of history, prophesy, the coming of the Messiah, and the beginnings of the church without getting lost in those details. The Bible is the Word of God. It is Father revealing Himself, His intention in creating man, His heartaches in what man has done (and is doing), and His work to bring understanding to His human creation. The Bible is also a love story of a God who created man in His image to be the object of His incredible love. He created man to call Him Father and to be allowed to be Father.

If one wants to know how important understanding the Bible is to a Christian, just take for example the conversation with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:16–35). They were discouraged because of the death of Jesus and were going home. Jesus came up to them, and they did not recognize Him. He responded to their discouragement and then used the Law and the Prophets to explain to them what the Father had done in sending Jesus. Then at the appropriate time He revealed Himself to them. The point is that He used the Old Testament to help them understand the working of the Father that was revealed in His dealings with the people historically and then also given to the prophets as future dealings in the coming of Jesus. It is vital that we understand what Father shows of Himself in the Old Testament, what He spoke about Who the Messiah would be, and then the details of how He would reveal Himself in sending Jesus as one of us, a human. If we don’t study this, then all we see is the teachings of Jesus and His redemptive act.

I fear that the focus of the church has been the redemptive work that Jesus accomplished when considering the historical Jesus. There is a certain consideration as to the teachings of Jesus like the Sermon on the Mount, but not on what John’s Gospel says in the first chapter, that the Word became flesh. To fully consider what that means, there has to be a look back at what was prophesized about Him hundreds of years before His birth.

So I will lay a foundation of the crux of the revelation of God through the Bible and then how a new understanding of the coming of Jesus as a Man enables the church to have the ability to truly be like Jesus and be the salt and light to this world.

Hopefully this book will show how, for centuries, the church has been hampered by worshipping and teaching a Jesus with an impossible to follow example; the church was being prepared as the bride for the wrong Christ. The definition of how Jesus was God and Man at the same time that was established in 451 at Chalcedon and used as the foundation of most traditional denominations had a major flaw.

That will be the crux of this book and answered at the end after a foundation is laid to show why it is flawed.

1

Why Was Man Created?

The Bible says in Genesis that God created man in His image. While it does not say explicitly why God created man, the whole message of the Bible reveals the purpose of man. In Genesis 2, it says that God came looking for Adam as He was used to doing, walking with Adam. In this passage and in other passages, there is a truth revealed that is very simple. God created man to have relationship with Him. The import of that was revealed to me when I was studying for a men’s Sunday school class when God stopped me in my studies and told me to read the Bible starting at Genesis 1:1 and stop when He said to stop. So I read Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and finally Deuteronomy where I had to stop because I got the point of why He told me to do all that reading. I had studied the Old Testament in the one year I went to Bible school, and most of those books are about the Law. It was sooo dry to me then. This time I was being helped by the power of the Holy Spirit, and what I saw was the intense love that God created us to receive and enjoy. When I got to Deuteronomy, I began to read the last will and testament of Moses to his people just before he would die. The main thing he told them was that God had chosen them to be His people, the focus of His care and love. He had given them the Law, which was a loving Father instructing His children how to live happily and safely. Moses scolded the people saying that they had taken the Law and put their own spin on it making it a dry set of rules. The cry of Moses’s heart comes through as he declares to his people that they had missed the love behind what God was doing. They had taken a simple relationship and turned it into a religion. I could not read any more. The love of God filled my heart like I had never experienced before. I had been smoking the whole time I was reading. I was up to three packs a day. When God’s love got done with my heart that day, I crushed out my last cigarette and never had any withdrawal symptoms. The power of His love changed me, my heart, and my mind. I was not the same afterward.

Being His child and the object of His love was why He created us. That is relationship, pure and simple. He explained it to me one day in a way fashioned just for me. I was good in English in school, and so He asked me if I remembered what the object of a sentence was. I responded with yes. Then He explained that in the sentence Jesus loves me, the object is me. He created me to be the object, the focus of His love. I knew from the day of my last cigarette what that really meant. He then went on to explain that love is an action verb which means that His love is always moving, following His desire to have it impact our day in a positive way, proving to us how much He loves us, and what that means in action.

This caused me to have a new understanding of my relationship with Him and a drastically different understanding of the Scriptures. The whole Bible became new to me as I realized why it has been preserved all these years and how important reading and studying it is.

The Bible is a history of God’s dealing with men with the intent to reveal His heart for the relationship that He desires with men. I have read the whole Bible multiple times, and each time I see His love revealed in ever-increasing magnitude. In that session years ago, I was reading how He explained to Moses how to teach the priests to diagnose and treat leprosy in people. After that He told Moses how to teach the priests how to diagnose leprosy in a building. I read the description and realized that I had seen what was being described. I remember seeing a white powder on the cement blocks in the basement of the house I grew up in. I realized that God was talking about mold and mildew, which has been determined to be one of the most powerful allergens. Its presence in a house can subtly tear down the immunity system of those who dwell in a house. For me