Apologetics - Yaweh

I have a friend living near the Café who is a Jehovah's witness. He is a very encouraging man and I love chatting to him. He is very fired up about God. We got to talking about Jesus. He is very adamant that Jesus is God's son and agrees that Jesus is special. The Jehovahs Witnesses have a very similar set of scriptures to ours and so it is good to get them to look for the truth in their own texts. In lectures Alan Black showed us a scripture that is very useful for talking to Jehovah's witnesses.

In Phillipians 2

  ⁵ In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:

 ⁶ Who, being in very nature God,
   did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
⁷ rather, he made himself nothing
   by taking the very nature of a servant,
   being made in human likeness.
⁸ And being found in appearance as a man,
   he humbled himself
   by becoming obedient to death—
      even death on a cross!

 ⁹ Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
   and gave him the name that is above every name,
¹⁰ that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
   in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
¹¹ and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,
   to the glory of God the Father.

See Jehovah's witnesses have the utmost respect for the name Jehovah - the (Hebrew jhw - jaweh). This is the name of God. Here in this text you will see that Jesus is in very nature God(v6) has equality with God (v6) and he gets the name that is above every other name(v9). It is an interesting text. I chatted with him about this. I didn't really understand his response and I don't think he was making much sense, but hopefully this will encourage him to look deeper into the text. I also reminded him that in the gospel (injeel) Jesus' name is Emmanuel which means God with us. I also told him that God said his name was 'I am' when he instructed the prophet Moses (or Musa) in the book of Exodus. 'I am' is a very strong statement - it talks of a living God, it talks of a God of the present. Please pray for my friend A_ and also think about how you can use texts in your bible to encourage other Jehovah's Witnesses to reject their teaching that Jesus is not God.

Epping forest

Today Natalie and I took some friends to Epping forest to walk about and exercise one very boisterous dog. I have only been once before and didn't remember it being so beautiful. There's been a lot of rain this summer and the forest was quite wet which is probably the reason why it was teeming with tiny frogs. The dog got some excellent exercise and we all had a really nice walk. Natalie made some coffee before we left the house as well as some banana bread which provided some form of picnic. It is really a nice way to 'hang out' with our contacts. It is difficult if you live in the city to get away from it at times and it can be quite smothering - this kind of break is good for the soul. It is nice to have a dog to walk too, a point of focus for us so that we don't need to get too deep into our personal problems. I hope that such a short break away will give us an opportunity to remember the beauty of God's creation which is often hidden by the ugliness of man's concrete jungle creation.