Thread: Acts 13:33 Interpretation - Today I have begotten You

Originally Posted by fuego

Well I don't see how it could be His literal death. Not sure how we would conform to that. So to me that speaks to conforming to His death TO the flesh, mortification. He didn't live for Himself or His own desires, ambitions, etc, etc, etc. He was totally dead to His flesh and totally alive to do the will of the Father. His meat was to do the will of the Father.

But he was perfected into that state only by way of his sufferings and his death. He died to sin, proved himself dead to it by rejecting it all the way through. He wasn't born perfected through suffering and dead to sin, he had to walk those things and prove himself. Only when death no longer could hold him was he perfected, in his faith and in his rejection of sin. We may identify with that death to sin. In our walk and in our hearts. Resurrection life flows from that.

I noticed something here. Anti-JDS advocates claim that Jesus' sufferings ended with the moment of physical death on the cross, his three days in hell have no bearing on atonement and then he was resurrected. A lot of Christians think we should identify with his carrying the cross to Calvary and bearing his shame, crucify the flesh by always walking in the Spirit like he did up until his death, identify with his sufferings at the hands of men when we are persecuted, rely on his strength when oppressed or tempted by the devil. But not when it comes to his actual death.

Romans 6:3 Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death?
4 Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.

The verses take us through a burial into his death and then through to his resurrection. There is no fast forward from his moment of death on the cross and to his resurrection when we identify with the whole thing.

Phil 3:10 that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death,
11 if, by any means, I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.

Yes, you are supposed to be conformed to his death. Not merely his death to the works of the flesh while walking this Earth. His actual death. The baptism in water symbolically takes us into his death that leads to his resurrection and represents the new birth from being alive to sin and dead to righteousness over into being dead to sin and alive to righteousness.
The process of progressive sanctification has us identify with that exchange to where the death and the life manifests in our hearts and lives. Conforming to his death produces resurrection life in turn, releasing what is positionally ours in the new birth.

1 Peter 4:1 Therefore, since Christ suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves also with the same mind, for he who has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin,
2 that he no longer should live the rest of his time in the flesh for the lusts of men, but for the will of God

Jesus' sufferings from Gethsemane until he was loosed from the pains of death and resurrected lead him to die completely to sin and death could no longer hold him. We share in the same victory and new life by conforming to the same death.

As I talked about a couple of pages ago, the very first statement about Jesus that the twelve apostles made to the people after his death and burial was that God had loosed the pains of death and resurrected him. That was in Acts 2:22-24. These are the next issues that they discuss :

Acts 2:29 “Men and brethren, let me speak freely to you of the patriarch David, that he is both dead and buried, and his tomb is with us to this day.
30“Therefore, being a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that of the fruit of his body, according to the flesh, He would raise up the Christ to sit on his throne,fn
31“he, foreseeing this, spoke concerning the resurrection of the Christ, that His soul was not left in Hades, nor did His flesh see corruption.

As Acts 13 says, David saw corruption in his flesh and according to other passages he wasn't released from Hades until Jesus preached to the OT saints held in custody there. But Jesus did not see corruption in his flesh, he was resurrected physically within three days. The physical resurrection was important to the Jews and Jesus remains the first human being resurrected never to see death again. His soul was also not left in Hades, which required a resurrection out of death. Without that he would have remained there forever.

32“This Jesus God has raised up, of which we are all witnesses.
33“Therefore being exalted to the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, He poured out this which you now see and hear.

Which connects the sermon to the outpouring on Pentecost that is the setting here, an outpouring that was now possible because Jesus had ascended bodily into heaven as an immortal, exalted to the right hand of God.

The above is the message on the resurrection of Jesus. There is nothing in the Bible that has more weight on that matter. Nothing ! It's a matter of making history, of declaring to the world the fundamentals of a message that had literally never been heard before.

To sum it up :

God did not leave Jesus' soul in hell but loosed the pains of death as he resurrected him before his body had decayed and he ascended to heaven exalted to the right hand of the Father and poured out the Holy Spirit for the new birth and empowering.

Every last bit of the above sentence is part of the fundamental gospel message.

You don't have to tell everyone all of that every time but all of it still is.

Originally Posted by Colonel

But he was perfected into that state only by way of his sufferings and his death. He died to sin, proved himself dead to it by rejecting it all the way through. He wasn't born perfected through suffering and dead to sin, he had to walk those things and prove himself. Only when death no longer could hold him was he perfected, in his faith and in his rejection of sin. We may identify with that death to sin. In our walk and in our hearts. Resurrection life flows from that.

The following is one of the heaviest passages on death vs life :

2 Cor 4:7 But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us.
8 We are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair;
9 persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed—

God forsook Jesus, he said so on the cross just before he gave up the ghost. But even in the midst of persecution towards death, Paul didn't share in that.

10 always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body.

While Jesus was simply dying on the cross, Paul shared in his death (at least its conclusion) but at the same time in his resurrection life.

11 For we who live are always delivered to death for Jesus’ sake, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. 12 So then death is working in us, but life in you.

The last sentence part is a poke, he's addressing Corinthians who are being entertained by the "superapostles", false apostles who were cool and didn't seem offensive to the world. Everything seemed okay to the Corinthians but the superapostles were exploiting them and lording it over them and the Corinthians were on loose ground, spiritually.

13 And since we have the same spirit of faith, according to what is written, “I believed and therefore I spoke,” we also believe and therefore speak,
14 knowing that He who raised up the Lord Jesus will also raise us up with Jesus, and will present us with you

Earlier in the letter there is a very concrete example of the "delivered to death for Jesus' sake" statement in verse 11 :

2 Cor 1:8 For we do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, of our trouble which came to us in Asia: that we were burdened beyond measure, above strength, so that we despaired even of life.
9 Yes, we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves but in God who raises the dead,
10 who delivered us from so great a death, and does deliver us; in whom we trust that He will still deliver us

Verse 9 sounds like they had been marked for death by people who were scheming against them. The two Iranian Christians who wrote "Captive in Iran" talk about this, how they had this awful feeling during the last months before they were arrested. It probably started after they had been spotted by security handing out New Testaments in a cafe and lasted during a time when they were lead to avoid evangelism so that their contacts wouldn't be exposed. (Then they faced a possible death sentence for almost a year while in prison of course). With Paul it was probably more acute and lasted shorter than months, maybe just days or weeks. But it sounds similar.

In a sense standing up for the gospel implies that one has declared the world crucified to oneself and oneself crucified to the world. There is a separation of death and from that a new life. Paul experienced that death in very concrete terms and so did the authors of the book I mentioned but to people who stand up for the gospel in areas where the probability of being persecuted like that is small, the same principle still holds.