Jehovah said to me, ‘You are my Son.Today I fathered you.’ Kiss the Son
or he will be angry and you will perish on the way because he will flare up
with his brief anger. Blessed are all those who trust in him”(Psalms 2 : 7 , 12 ).
[ 3 ] On the basis of these passages, we can now draw the conclusion
that everyone who wants to be a true Christian and be saved by Christ
has to believe that Jesus is the Son of the living God.
Those who do not believe this and think of Jesus as only the Son of
Mary implant in themselves various ideas about him that are damaging
and destructive to their salvation (see above, §§ 90 , 94 , 102 ). One could
say the same thing about them as about the Jews—instead of a royal
crown, they put a crown of thorns on Jesus’ head, give him vinegar to
drink, and shout, “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross”
[see Matthew 27 : 40 ]. Or else they say what the devil who tempted him
said: “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread,” or,
“If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down [from the Temple
roof ]” (Matthew 4 : 3 , 6 ).
People like this desecrate the Lord’s church and his house of worship.
They make it a den of thieves. They are the people who turn devotion to
the Lord into something like devotion to Muhammad. They do not dis-
tinguish between true Christianity, which is worship of the Lord, and
materialist philosophy. They could be compared to people riding in a car-
riage or a wagon on thin ice, and the ice breaks under them, and they
sink, and they and their horses and carriage disappear into the icy water.
They could also be compared to people who weave a life raft out of rushes
and reeds, using tar to glue it together; and they set out onto the great
expanse of the ocean, but out there the tar glue dissolves; and choked by
the brine, they are swallowed up and buried in the depths of the sea.
3
The Way We Receive Faith Is by Turning to the Lord,
Learning Truths from the Word,
and Living by Those TruthsBefore I begin demonstrating how faith arises(which occurs when we 343
turn to the Lord, learn truths from the Word, and live by those truths)
and before we move into individual aspects of faith, I first need to present
§343 faith 413