Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – 1 Corinthians 1–7

Evangelical Questions: Satan and Jesus are brothers? by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about an issue that baffles Evangelicals to their core: Jesus and Satan as brothers.. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand. So, we’re in 1 Corinthians now, and in chapter 1 we get a lot of talk about unity, acting as one in Christ, that we are all brothers and sisters. I don’t have a specific verse that really sums this up in a tidy way, so I’m just using the overall theme here. There is a lot of corruption and immorality happening in the church in Corinth and Paul is writing to them to basically tell them to get it together. You may know this but Paul basically has 2 modes that go something like this. We see the first mode in the opening of this letter. Paul says, “Unto the church of God which is at Corinth, to them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints….” But there is another side of Paul that he gets to pretty quickly here and it’s all, “For the love of God, could you little freaks act normal for 5 min?” And this is what we get a lot of in both 1 and 2 Corinthians. And for good reasons. But with both of these modes what he is doing is trying to inspire them to be better than they have been, and treating each other like actual brothers and sisters is a big part of that here. Now, Latter-day Saints, when I say, “God is the Father of us all,” you nod your head and hear no issue with that. You’re probably thinking, “Yeah, Jennifer, skip past the part I already know. God is the Father of all.” But, let me tell you how it gets a little weird for Evangelicals. They would put a huge asterisk next to the word “all” and in the footnote would be something like, “Well, God is the Father of all humans who choose to belong to him. But not really the Father of ALL.” We’ve talked before on this show about how Evangelicals see God as an entirely different species from humans, so he’s not actually their Father in the way Latter-day Saints think about. And the question that comes up here sometimes from Evangelicals is something like, “Wait. You think God is the Father of both Jesus and Satan?” A lot of Latter-day Saints would respond with, “Umm, yeah, of course. He is the Father of all.” I want to explain to you how and why Evangelicals hear it differently and we’re going to do that by talking about a very old little film called The God Makers. If you are close to my age, or older, you probably already know what this is. But if not, the brief summary is that it was the most popular anti-mormon propaganda of its day. It’s a movie that was put out in the early 1980’s. It runs about an hour long. You can watch it on Youtube if you really want to. Sometimes its under the title, “Banned Mormon Cartoon!” It was very popular with Evangelicals in the 1980’s. Most of you know I grew up in an Evangelical church and my church showed that film as frequently as they could. We watched it during the church service sometimes, and they would have Sunday School classes where they’d watch it and talk more in-depth about it. The reason I bring up this movie is that it is one of the big sources of twisting truth just enough so that our beliefs