Worshipping a Merely Human Jesus Is Wrong No Matter How Exalted

The following is a copy and paste of my comments at Triablogue's blogpost: Dale Tuggy's Da Vinci Code

and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.- Rom. 1:23

Unitarians are so committed to their presuppositions that they're willing to deny the core Jewish and Christian ethic against creature worship based on the 1st & 2nd Commandments. Jews and the early Christians condemned 1. the Pagan use of idols along with the Pagan principle that they weren't worshipping the idols themselves but the gods they image/represent. 2. rejected Pagan Kings claiming to be gods (e.g. the latter Caesars). 3. rejected worship of humans exalted via apotheosis. The Jews & Christians understanding that to promote those would fall into the very lie of the serpent of Genesis that it's possible, regarding humans, that "ye shall be as gods/God/elohim."

The Jews complained to God that they didn't have a human king from among their people like the surrounding nations. God told Samuel, "...'Obey the voice of the people in all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them' " (1 Sam. 8:7). In many (not all) forms of Unitarianism Jesus is neither fully God nor fully man (or remains a man). Whereas in the Trinitarian incarnation both are fulfilled in that 1. the Jews do have a Jewish human Messiah as their King, and 2. God himself (the second person of the Trinity) rules over them (and the rest of the world) in a direct theocracy at the eschaton.

In fact, God literally walks among them (via the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and Christ in the flesh) as Paul quotes the OT in 2 Cor. 6:16, "I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people." Similar to how Jehovah/Yahweh was wont to walk with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the day (Gen. 3:8), or as He talked with Abraham in bodiy form (Gen. 18:22-33). Solomon said, "But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you; how much less this house that I have built!" (1 King. 8:27). Yet we know that God's presence entered that temple. Christ the New Temple of the New Covenant is greater than the old temple (Matt. 12:6) because God Himself literally dwells in the body of Christ (Col. 1:19; 2:9).

Rev. 21:3 states, "Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God." Notice that the dwelling place of God is a HE. Who else can that "HE" be but Christ who is "God with us" (Matt. 1:23). The Divine Logos Himself become flesh and taburnacling as God among us (John 1:14). According to 2. Thess. 2:3-4, Satan, wanting to mimic Jesus, attempts to set up a lawless man who proclaims himself to be Almighty God in God's temple (whatever that temple might be, whether a building or within the Church). If the man of lawless is mimicking Jesus by claiming to be Almighty God, then Jesus must be Almighty God. This might be further corroborated if the man of lawless is an or (even THE) anti-Christ. Since, "anti" here most likely means "in the place/stead of" rather than "against" the true Christ.

I mentioned three basic types of pagan idolatries. Most versions of Unitarianism commit one or more of those errors but instead of a pagan God with a pagan image, they attempt to worship the Christian God with Christ as the image. The problem is, unless Jesus is truly God, he would be a false image of God rather than the VERY image of God. Only God can truly and perfectly reflect and reveal God. The whole purpose of the prohibition of creating physical images of Yahweh is that they don't adequately convey the glory, majesty and transcendence of God. This isn't the case under Trinitarian incarnation.

15 "Therefore watch yourselves very carefully. Since you saw no form on the day that the LORD spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire,16 beware lest you act corruptly by making a carved image for yourselves, in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female,17 the likeness of any animal that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged bird that flies in the air,18 the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the water under the earth.19 And beware lest you raise your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, you be drawn away and bow down to them and serve them....- Deut. 4:15-19a