And there came a voice out of the cloud, saying This is My beloved Son, hear Him. Luke 9:35
One of the claims of the Russelites, the so-called Jehovah’s Witness, is that they adhere strictly to the teachings of the Bible. That’s easy for them to say, of course, because they wrote their own perversion of the Bible to conform to their own blasphemous doctrines. No credible Bible scholars accept the New World Translation as having any credibility whatsoever. Most of the so-called translation committee for that version were totally ignorant of either Greek or Hebrew. A leading Greek scholar, Dr. William Barclay, said of the NWT, ‘it is abundantly clear that a sect which can translate the New Testament like that is intellectually dishonest.’ An interesting fact about the NWT is that it has undergone many revisions over the years, to accommodate the shifting doctrines of the cult. Revelation 22:18-19 reminds us that the producers and peddlers of the NWT are facing some dire judgment for their evil deeds. How good to know that we can depend on a Bible that remains unchanged, based on the words of God’s beloved Son!
The voice from the cloud reminded the disciples that they were to listen to the Lord Jesus. Peter had just made a wild proposal to build tabernacles for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah. But the voice from the cloud put an end to all such fanciful ideas. The disciples were to continue what they had been doing: listening to the Lord Jesus and learning from Him. This they did until His earthly ministry was ended. After Pentecost, those same disciples applied themselves to teaching the new Christians as the Gospel was preached. And what they taught was what the Lord Jesus had taught them. The writers of the Gospels and of the epistles in our New Testament did the same. Everything that you and I hold to concerning the doctrines of our faith is based on what we received from the Lord Jesus. Those things most surely believed among us are from none other lips than those of the Son of God. That is why we can trust them and base our Christian life and our eternal welfare on them.
Consider the statement, ‘This is My beloved Son, hear Him’. God is asking us, requiring us, to pay attention to what His Son is saying, and to heed what we hear. We have already heard and heeded what He has to say concerning the Gospel: whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life (John 3:16). We are hearing Him daily as we seek to follow Him: If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me (Matthew 16:24). We hear His admonition to us to share what we have received: Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost (Matthew 28:19). And that’s just the start, of course.
If the Lord Jesus taught it, we can trust it, and we should live it. – Jim MacIntosh