Mortal Messiah Victorious King, Part 4

Welcome

Prayer

Song

Silence

MORTAL MESSIAH,

VICTORIUS KING

Part IV

May 24th 2026

Here in the fourth episode of our fourth series this year that we have called, Mortal Messiah, Victorious King, we come to what I personally feel is one of the most significant realizations about the biblically-based faith today and our understanding of it from a fulfilled perspective.

Here we will provide part I of II of our philosophical stance through fulfillment.

We have discussed the importance of Yeshua the Mortal Messiah as a foundational cornerstone in the faith that reconciled the world to YAHAVAH and takes those of faith into His presence.

Today, I want to take us to a super significant realm of organized religion whether we like it or not, and that is the how philosophy has contributed to the faith even before Christ and how unfortunately most Christians have failed to allow an essential philosophical contribution from a believer to further our understanding of Christ’s Victory in the world.

These ideas have been germinating in my mind since I first embarked on a casual study of philosophy in my late teens and twenties and as of ten days ago solidified into a facet of Christianity I believe has been wrongly overlooked in the face of the biblical narrative.

Years ago when we debated the Trinity right her in this room, calling the presentation, “the Inquisition” a local pastor recently honored with a PHD said to me from the audience, “You need to study your Greek.”

For whatever reasons, but like many people experience in life, these words stuck with me as they rang oddly in my mind when he said it.

At the time I assumed it rang odd because I had read up on Hellenistic culture and did appeal to the Greek in teaching but there was a far more fundamental tension in his words that seemed to underscore a unstated pride in the man, and I remember in the midst of that event thinking,

“that is part of the problem with the faith, post doctorate pastor,” but I could not say exactly why.

So first some background that is important to all I am going to say today.

We know that YAHAVAH had called the Nation of Israel out to be a distinct people and for Him and for them to not seek out other Gods. Over the course of their history they struggled to make this happen and frequently found themselves swayed by outside information from other cultures.

Greek culture influenced early Judaism primarily during what is called the Hellenistic period (which is thought to have been at its height from around the 4th century BC to 1st century CE).

This fusion between a purely Hebrew mindset to an admixture of Greek and Hebrew thinking occurred through the conquests of Alexander the Great, which served to integrate the Greek world into Israel and led to widespread adoption of Greek language, philosophy, and political structures among what was supposed to be restricted Jewish communities.

This is what appears to have happened.

In 332 BCE Alexander the Great conquered what is known as “the Levant” which is the entire region of Eastern Mediterranean – meaning all of

Syria

Lebanon

Jordan

Israel

Palestine (Palestinian Territories) and many of the bordering regions including

Cyprus:

Iraq and

Turkey

Put it this way, all of these countries including Iran are considered part of the Middle East but the countries I just named make up what is known as the Levant, which comes from a French word with means, “to rise” and that refers to the east where the sun rises.

In the 2nd Century BCE there was an uprising among the Jews know as the Maccabean revolt which was a reaction against aggressive Hellenization policies and was ignited when a man name Antiochus Ephiphanes slaughtered a pig in the temple at Jerusalem.

However, subsequent Jewish rulers (known as the Hasmoneans) continued to utilize Greek administrative and cultural frameworks within the Nation.

As a point of information the Ancient Greek civilization came first, preceding the Roman Empire by several hundreds of years.

Specifically Greek civilization flourished as early as 1600 BC, while the city of Rome was traditionally founded in 753 BC, and the Roman Empire did not officially begin until 27 BC.

As a result Hellenistic influence remained the primary lingua franca throughout the Roman Empire, heavily permeating Jewish diaspora communities (or the communities spread out outside of Judea) but as we have learned in our studies of the Apostolic Record it even reached into the heart of Israel, Jerusalem.

I tend to see Hellenistic culture as a contributing arm to Judeo Christian thought and religious practice, from the mind of Man and therefore from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

This is to say that God allowed human wisdom to infiltrate his otherwise sought after strict allegiance to Him alone. But more on this idea later.

So, many Jews, particularly in major diaspora hubs like Alexandria, Egypt, adopted Greek as their primary language.

This necessitated translating the Hebrew Bible into Greek which became a seminal text known as the Septuagint. So much so that what are known as, “Greek loanwords” even became common in the Hebrew/Aramaic of the era.

It is fascinating to me that Yeshua cited the Septuagint version of the tanakh instead of the Hebrew version – that is how influential Hellenism was on Israel.

In time Jewish thinkers, most notably Philo of Alexandria, synthesized biblical traditions with Greek philosophy (such as Platonism and Stoicism) to explain monotheistic concepts using rational, universalist terms.

Additionally, Judean scholars and authors began adopting sophisticated Greek rhetorical styles and genres to record their own history and laws, making their traditions accessible to the wider Mediterranean world.

This also led to the creation of distinct religious-political sects (like the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes) which paralleled the long standing Greek philosophical schools established by their most noted philosophers like Plato and Aristotle.

Bottom line, by the time Yeshua was born, most of Judaism in and around Israel and in the diaspora communities had been greatly Hellenized.

This God allowed. This God appears to have used on earth among Men because no matter what we try to say, Greek thought, philosophy and the way they lived influence Judaism outside the revelations at Sinai.

Got all of that backstory?

Now, when we examine early Greek development of thought, there were some very early fundamental ideas floating around and these were proffered by two different men – Parmenides and Heraclitus.

In a simple summary, Parmenides claimed that everything is in a fixed static state while Heraclitus claimed nothing is fixed, and coined the famous line, “you can never step in the same river twice.”

What do you say? The thinking leads to ideas about God – is He fixed or is He constantly changing? Can these two ideals co-exist in the same world? And if so, how?

So again, many essential ideas orbiting around in early Greek philosophy – which again – was not what God had given the Nation to pursue Him by – wound up greatly influencing the way the Jews – and then Christianity – would think about God.

In the Garden, at Sinai, He said “faith.” Adding, “not your knowledge, not your logic but mine.”

But in this world God seems to allow for our wisdom in to the mix – right and wrong but obviously, hence the innumerable ideas and doctrines about Him.

I tend to think that instead of God demanding rigidity of us He has allowed for fluidity as a means for us to come and reason together with Him in our two way street relationships with Him.

Of course, concretized religionists disagree – and I digress.

But for the time being we are going to categorize God’s ways from the Garden as “Jerusalem” meaning, a “through faith in God all things are possible,” approach and we will label Greek thought as “Athens,” meaning there is a logic and reason and knowledge by which Man seeks to know and understand him.

Again, we might say these two view hearken all the way back to the Garden with Jerusalem representing the Tree of Life and Athens representing the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

We maintain that the former corresponds to the Spirit of Christ in the world and the latter corresponds to the Spirit of Man by which we live and thrive materially.

Again – “God’s ways” which the Bible presents as “Jerusalem” I liken to the Spirit of Christ in the world, and Mans ways we will label “Athens,” I liken to the Spirit of Man – which we all have access to as a means to survive and thrive and materially live.

Little did I realize was the Pastor at the Inquisition was promoting Athens, and even though I was far more philosophically based in my Spirit of Man humanity than he knew, I was from the heart far more Jerusalem in my relationship to God than Athens.

So, what happens from the realms of early Greek philosophy?

A guy named Plato came on the scene and started writing – often from a position of putting words in the mouth of his mentor who never wrote anything, Socrates.

And Plato, from whom almost all of the world of philosophy rests, wanted to explore how to know the truth about things – how to know what is real and what is not.

In the world of logic and philosophy, Plato was essentially exploring what we call metaphysics. And while this word was not coined until later and assigned to Aristotle who came later, Plato is considered the father of metaphysics.

And in his explorations he created four levels or categories to explain the way we know the truth about anything (again, this all came from his human capacities to reason and think making his insights a form of Athenian made-made religion, in my estimation) instead of Him being inspired by God who established things with little explanation through Israel.

And what Plato did was give us four basic categories on how we can know the truth of anything.

Remember, before this, going all the way back to the Garden, God said, “trust me, walk by faith” (Jerusalem) but our first parents chose knowledge (Athens) and again, God appears to have allowed us, in this material domain, to pursue Him through these means as well.

Still following?

So, Plato says, the lowest form of knowing the Truth about something is from dreams, imagination, visions, and such.

He said that this level of understanding was almost completely unreliable because there was no way to discern from our imagination what is real and what is not.

Based on Plato’s definition, epiphanies and revelations must be subordinated to reason and logic because without such immaterial claims were suspect.

The second way Plato said we could determine truth was by observation of a thing – meaning seeing, hearing, feeling the thing. To him, the second best way to determine truth (which transcends imagination and dreams) was by making observations of the material essence of a thing and through this approach he says that by the senses we know the difference between a chair, an apple and a human being.

Plaot said this knowledge is superior to imagination in coming to the truth or reality of a thing.

So, far so good – because again, Plato was exploring realms of thought from being a living thinking human being and therefore his findings were based in logic rather than revelation. In Athens instead of Jerusalem.

The third and even better way of knowing something according to Plato is to understand as many of the varieties of an observable thing – and to further categorize them accordingly as unique and distinct.

In that way, imaginations, and even our knowledge of observational findings would expand beyond just recognizing a chair from an apple from a man, but we would see that some apples are green, some are red, some are yellow and that there are frankly 7500 of different varieties of apples in the world!

When we do this our knowledge increases of the reality of them which serve as defined distinctives.

Just to let you know, Aristotle would come in after Plato and become a "systems expert," pioneering the formal study of logic by creating an overarching structural frameworks for biology, physics, and governance.

In the annuls hf philosophy He remains the ultimate founder of systemic reasoning as his contributions to systematic thought include:

“Formal Logic” where he invented the field by developing “the syllogism”—a structured system of deductive reasoning (e.g., All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal).

Aristotle is also regarded as the first genuine scientist, famously categorizing and detailing hundreds of animal species in his work History of Animals.

Then in his Nicomachean Ethics, he evaluated human happiness, virtue, and friendship not as isolated traits, but as an interconnected, interdependent system designed to work as a whole.

Finally to understand government, he and his students systematically collected and analyzed the political organizations and data of from 158 different city-states before presenting their findings in Politics.

So while some of his specific physics and biological conclusions were eventually disproved during the Scientific Revolution, Aristotle’s foundational method of empirical observation, classification, and logical proof pretty much defined Western thought for over two millennia and this has been especially true in the development of Christianity over time.

From what I can see, Aristotle focused primarily on Plato’s third highest level of knowing something.

But, according to Plato, there is a fourth level of knowing the truth that transcends even this type of understanding.

This is where I suggest Athens, or in other words, human religion began to presumptuously assume a role in faith that was never addressed by God who simply said, “trust in YAHAVAH with all your heart and lean not unto your own understanding – in all your ways, submit to him and He will direct your paths.”

But admittedly, God has allowed Athens into the mix among men, and our job is to make the tough decision on how much of our food will be from the Tree of Life and how much will be from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil because in the reconciled world, man exists in a dual real – the material and the Spiritual.

In any case, the highest form of knowledge might be described as knowing the immutable form of a thing – the unchanging details from the invisible subatomic structures to all the chemical and natural and mineral elements of the thing, to all the categorized items that contribute to making a human a human, an apple an apple, a chair a chair and therefore what distinguishes them one from another.

Plato called this “an understanding of the Form of a thing” which is like comprehending the “established, set template of the thing” and while Plato did not seem to directly say that a living God is the author of all the countless Forms in our material (and even spiritual existences), he believed in a divine reality, though his concept of "God" was highly abstract and very different from the traditional, human-like gods of ancient Greek mythology.

Instead of teaching about a personal deity, Plato’s highest spiritual principle was known as, "the Good," and I believe this Good is the basis of all human religion and not always the true and living God.

Plato viewed this realm of Forms and the comprehension of it all as the ultimate source of truth and his forms are a perfect, unchanging reality that exists even beyond the physical world.

For me, Plato’s highest realm of knowledge merely winds back up at the lower levels of comprehension of imagination, dreams and visions because we do not have a sound grasp of the realities of any thing completely so it is left up to Man to create them.

Anyway, in his cosmological work Timaeus, Plato introduced the Demiurge, a divine artisan or "maker" that is akin to the Judeo-Christian God.

And Plato’s Demiurge, instead of creating the universe out of nothing like the Jews once believed, was this rational creator that shaped the chaotic physical world by organizing it according to the perfect, eternal Forms upon which it would materially create the world.

So, while Plato also accepted the existence of the traditional Greek gods, he heavily criticized the myths that portrayed them as flawed, changing, or capable of immoral behavior.

His view of the gods was they were perfectly rational, immortal, and perfect guardians of the universe and his rational, philosophical approach to the divine laid the groundwork for many ideas in Western theology whether Jewish, early Christian, or Islamic.

I must reiterate (to the point of being irritating) that I see his contributions, again, from the Spirit of Man (Athens), and again, he greatly helped establish the tenets of human religion in the process.

Now, it was Plato who taught the famous Allegory of the Cave as a means to illustrate the philosophical basis for our either seeing shadows on a wall or coming out of our cave and seeing the reality of a thing under the light of the Sun.

To boil this all down, if we take Plato’s ideas about the four ways to know truth and reality, and we look to His highest ideal of the Forms dictating the fixed, immaterial, absolute, invisible truth of a thing (giving nod to Parmenides) who claimed all real things are in fixed state, we have come to a place where others have relabeled the Forms as the “Essence of a thing.”

I maintain that it was Plato’s explanation of fixed forms (or unchangeable Essences) that contributed to the Judeo/Christian/Muslim idea that God and His laws (because they are true) is also a fixed, immutable being as are immaterial concepts like truth, good and beauty.

That, in coupling passages from the Tanakh like,

Numbers 23:19, which contrasts God with humans, stating “that He does not change his mind.”

Or other key biblical passages that tend to establish this doctrine like,

Malachi 3:6: which explicitly states, "For I the Lord do not change"

.

And James 1:17 which describes God as having "no variation or shadow due to change".

And or Hebrews 13:8 which affirms that "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever".

Or Psalm 102:27 that proclaims, "but you are the same, and your years have no end".

I suggest that Hebrews 6:17-18 gives us better clarification on these ideas of a fixed God, as it speaks, in the King James, of the “immutability of his counsel,” but another translation restates that line saying,

Hebrews 6:17 (WNT) In the same way, since it was God's desire to display more convincingly to the heirs of the promise how unchangeable His purpose was.

In other words, the sacred text seems to support that God is a fixed form in terms of His character and his unchangeable purposes, but that perhaps the Judeo-Christian idea that He is fixed and static in every way is a Platonian stretch.

Got all of that?

We maintain that this Platonian logic infiltrated Judaism around the time of them being taken into captivity and when Judaism emerged from being partially and increasingly assimilated into a Hellenized world of thought, YAHAVAH’s “ways of Jerusalem through plain old faith alone” merged with the logic of Athenian ideals and formed the basis for all Christ-centered material religion today.

Was Plato wrong? In my opinion, no and yes. He was wrong in thinking that humans understand God’s Form and can decide what He is, isn’t and how he works, but He was right because in this world, his system does mesh very well with the Old Testament view of Law.

What was the result? Essentially, religious leaders over followers of Christ, incorporating Plato’s teaching on “forms or essences” not only established a body of dogmatic Law’s about the nature of the true and living God but also started to believe they could define the Essence of immaterial principles, like how to rightly define Justice, beauty, art, government, labeling them as fixed and immutable.

Admittedly, these Platonian insights about God and Forms may rationally reflect the reality of how God created the material world and what God was calling the Nation to Follow – His Forms for being righteous through the Law.

In other words, borrowing from Plato and his concept of forms it seems reasonable that God established and authored the forms of things and that they are the reality – an apple is truly an apple from a predetermined form which distinguishes it from a chair, which is a different Form than a human being.

And speaking of Man, Christians took the biblical narrative and assigned Platos’ philosophy of Forms to say we are a fixed Essence, immutable, unchanging and therefore there is a way to live and be a man or a woman accordingly.

We could easily conclude that Plato’s Essences are akin to God’s immutable laws, and we might even suggest that from this position the entire Old Testament was a reflection of what Man had to be and do to even come close to meeting Holy God and that was through living according to His immutable Essences found in the Tanakh.

In and from this place, a man had a penis, a woman had a vagina, they were a pair, there was and is no variation as the Essence of Man is a fixed Essence.

For me, I do not have a problem with these ideas relative to God and how He created all things. An apple is from His defined Essence of an Apple, and a banana conforms to a fixed Essence of a banana.

To be a human there was an ideal form. To please perfect God there was an essential way. This was the Law. So in the end, this Platonian idea can be summarized in the following key phrase,

“Essence proceeds Existence.”

Which means, God established all of the Forms or Essences of everything, they are perfect, they are his configurations and there is no getting around them.

Period.

And this mindset has served as the practice and policies of all Judeo-Christian ethics ever since.

Right?

So, whether Jew, Muslim or Christian of any merit, the standard has been that there is a holy, immoveable, fixed God who created holy, immoveable fixed forms, and the human race and those who truly believe, love and follow Him MUST comply, at least to the best of their ability, to the Essence of all things (listen) irrespective of our Existence.

Again, this idea is captured in the understood idea that, “Essence proceeds existence,” which basically says, your person, your individuality, your feelings and inclinations (the things of your respective Existences) mean nothing in the face of God and His established Forms or Essences.

All my conscious life I have been under the sway of this modeling – especially as a Latter-Day Saint but equally as a Evangelical.

It is the standard by which most Christian and even Monotheistic religions operate - deviate in mind, will, emotion – even heart – and God will spew you out of His mouth.

Philosophers the world over took these ideas and expanded them out over the millennia into different expressions and even into opposing ideas but Judeo Christian religion has made an entire economy off the idea that “Essence proceeds Existence.”

But . . . in another expression of Athens, from another source of the Spirit of Man, another Danish philosopher, listen – who was a Christian, stepped forward and what did he suggest?

A radical “almost-but not totally” idea that flipped Plato’s ideals embraced by religion and said . . . (drumroll please)

“Existence proceeds Essence.”

This was not entirely rejected by Plato because he distinguished the fixed state ideas of Parmenides of form from the Hereclidian idea that everything is in a state of flux by establishing a dualistic realm of reality.

In other words, Plato split reality into two distinct realms: the physical world, which is a Heraclitean domain of constant change, and the metaphysical realm of Forms, which is an unchanging Parmenidean domain.

This idea we suggest is consistent with the biblical narrative that speaks plainly of God making Man, giving us freewill, the world entering into sin, death, decay and change, and that while God and His designs were certainly established, the material world in the face of the fall, was forever unstable, changing and unfixed.

So Plato balanced the two seemingly contradictory philosophies by assigning them to different levels of reality and agreed that the physical, sensory world is governed by constant change and flux.

However, he argued that because physical things are constantly changing, they can never be the source of true and stable knowledge – which is fair.

But Plato also and obviously agreed with Parmenides that genuine truth requires unchanging, eternal objects and located these objects in the "Forms"—perfect, immutable concepts (like Justice or Beauty) that exist outside of time and space.

So to summarize and wrap up Plato’s philosophy, physical objects in the Heraclitean world merely participate and function from an ideal of Parmenidean Forms.

Our sensible world therefore is in a constantly shifting, imperfect copy of the eternal, unchanging reality and this allowed Plato to validate our sensory experience of constant motion without sacrificing the possibility of absolute truth.

What Plato and most religious institutions failed to know or recognize is God had a solution to this dualistic impasse, and it is seen in the incarnation of His Son, which paradoxically, Kierkegaard was able to explain to a world fixated on man pleasing God through compliance to His established forms that reaching the Essences of God was never possible, and another better more reasonable approach was available in this world and can be understood in a highly controversial flip that screams, No! Existence proceeds Essence.

It is here where we will wrap up this Series next week where we give meaning to the fulfilled perspective to the faith.

Questions

Comments

Prayer