Jesus

The Baptism of the Holy Spirit: the Power of the Cross

Reflections

The Reflection Series for this month is adapted from Reasoning the Rest, which you can read or download from the main menu. This month, we’re reflecting on the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Read along with this series here. 

The Power of the Cross

The cross is and has always been the sign of Christianity. Today it is unmistakably synonymous with the Christian church. However, while the cross has always and must always be the sign of the faith, the overexposure of the cross without true understanding poses an important question. Do we really understand the cross?

We see crosses blanketing city skylines atop churches that fail at living out the gospel. We see people wearing the cross on necklaces and earrings who openly profess no desire to submit to God. We see athletes drop to their knees following some athletic feat, pointing to the sky and making the sign of the cross on their chest, who place more faith in their athletic equipment and contracts than the Holy Word of God. With so many misrepresentations surrounding us on a daily basis, it is easy to see how the message of the cross has gone misunderstood. In fact, for many Christians, the looming cross on the wall of a Church often evokes much more fear and obligation than peace and joy.

From this landscape of misunderstanding and misrepresentation concerning the cross, the understanding that emerges from  the baptism of the Holy Spirit appears distinctly different. Upon being baptized in the Holy Spirit, the cross is no longer a marketing symbol or burden. The cross suddenly is seen in the light in which it was originally meant to be seen.

This light illuminates more than just wood and metal. This light illuminates pain, the unbelievable pain Jesus endured hanging on the cross. This light illuminates sacrifice, the costly sacrifice Jesus paid for the sake of saving us from the pain and suffering that we rightly deserve and he had no obligation to undertake in our stead. The light also illuminates the sacrifice that God the Father experienced in seeing his own son endure the suffering we deserved, in feeling separation from a son that he had always had intimate fellowship with, a son who had never done anything wrong. Lastly, this light illuminates love, the love of God to see such beauty within us, despite the layers of sin, that to lose his own son was worth seeing us back in unity with him. The love to never give up or let us out of his reach. The love to know how deeply we need a Father to guide us.

This love is not just sacrificial, but is an invitation. The beginning of the end. The start of something new. The cross leads to the tomb and ultimately ends in resurrection and new life, a new life we are given as a result of the cross. The baptism of the Holy Spirit isn’t simply an outward manifestation of the supernatural. The baptism of the Holy Spirit is the only thing that can open the eyes of our heart to see the reality of the cross, beyond what our physical eyes have always seen.

This is why I speak to them in parables:
‘Though seeing, they do not see;
though hearing, they do not hear or understand.’
In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah:
‘You will be ever hearing but never understanding;
you will be ever seeing but never perceiving.
For this people’s heart has become calloused;
they hardly hear with their ears,
and they have closed their eyes.
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
hear with their ears,
understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.’
But blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear. For truly I tell you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it.
Matthew 13:13-17

The baptism of the Holy Spirit opens our spiritual eyes to see the cross in the power that it truly possesses.

Tuesday Devotional: 3 John

Devotional

Read 3 Johnbible

There is a powerful unity among those who profess faith in Jesus Christ.  Followers of Jesus find a home in knowing that each and every person is walking on the same path that starts at the cross and ends in his kingdom.  However, at the cross we do not just find a team, but the life of Jesus Christ alone sacrificed for the entire world. We find a Lord and Savior who unites his church through faith in him, but we are also given the power and commandment to take his Holy Spirit out into the world so that they too can find him.  At the foot of the cross we do find a family of believers and a body to become a part of.  However, this family ought never confine or prevent us from reaching into the world of those yet to be grafted in.  Our mission is to find our home with Christ through the fellowship of believers, yet be fully aware of our necessity to go forth into the world in order to bring others back home.  Each and every person must be brought into this faith in Jesus Christ.

Regardless of the point in a person’s life at which they met the Lord and submitted to the work of the cross, in each testimony is a point where they did not have faith in Jesus Christ.  Therefore, the one thing that all of us share is that at one point we were all strangers to Christ, even though he knew us from the beginning.  Every testimony begins with our separation from Christ as a result of our sin.  Thus, as we come into faith in Jesus Christ, we can never adopt a tone of the privileged preaching to the under-privileged.  At the foot of the cross we all receive grace, we all receive mercy and we all receive forgiveness.

This is the gospel that must be taken to the furthest corners of the world and unleashed in healing.  For those overwhelmed and transformed by that experience at the cross there is only one truth. Jesus Christ is the Lord.  Our place in his presence is leveled at the foot of the cross upon which he gave his life for us.  In his presence there are only two groups: reunited children and children yet to be reunited.  Either way, both groups consist of children of the same heavenly Father who desires all of them be brought back home.  In the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ we find our family, only family because we share a common Father.  In this Father we find our new life, our new way and the new brothers and sisters, unified because we have all been lost but are now found.

Reflection: The Virgin Birth

Reflections

The Reflection Series for this month is adapted from Reasoning the Rest, which you can read or download from the main menu. This month, we’re reflecting on the virgin birth of Jesus Christ. 

Support for belief in the Virgin Birth can be traced backwards through five important events in the history of the Christian Faith:

  1. The Ascension
  2. The Resurrection/The Crucifixion
  3. The Gospel
  4. The Virgin Birth

In our final week reflecting on the virgin birth of Christ, let’s consider what that event means for faith in Jesus.

 

After tracing the story backwards from the Ascension, to the Resurrection and Crucifixion, to the ministry of Jesus in the Gospels, we find ourselves at the place where the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus can be believed, where the Gospels and the writers of Gospels begin in the flesh.  Whereas Matthew and Luke both include the story of the Virgin Birth in their narratives of Jesus Christ, the prophecies that the Messiah would born to a Virgin in the specific town and from the exact line that God had guided and blessed since the first man of Eden no longer seem historically unbelievable. The impossible becomes not only possible but plausible, and the life of Jesus Christ stands as the one and only Savior of the world, born to direct us to the hand of God at work in the world we live in. “With God all things are possible,” as the angel Gabriel told Mary, and as one traces these landmark events in the Christian faith back, including the virgin birth, one finds that God does not require belief purely on blind-faith in the impossible, but rather we discover a greater faith in the impossible becoming possible through the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The Virgin Birth: the Gospel

Reflections

The Reflection Series for this month is adapted from Reasoning the Rest, which you can read or download from the main menu. This month, we’re reflecting on the virgin birth of Jesus Christ. 

Support for belief in the Virgin Birth can be traced backwards through five important events in the history of the Christian Faith:

  1. The Ascension
  2. The Resurrection/The Crucifixion
  3. The Gospel
  4. The Virgin Birth

This week, let’s consider how the Gospel and ministry of Jesus support our faith in the Virgin Birth.

For years the Gospels were viewed by many critics and unbelievers as works of fiction compiled by believers desperate to create a story worth believing, hell-bent on forcing others to believe in it. As history has come to validate the life and death of the man named Jesus, history has done the Gospels equal justice. The years in which the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were estimated to have been written have slowly worked their way closer and closer to the actual time of Jesus’ passing in roughly 33 C.E. In the presence of more research and study of the Palestine area, the information in the Gospel of Luke has slowly been legitimized piece by piece as fact, as opposed to fabrication or amateur scholarship. The Gospels as we find them now, of a man who clearly died and must have resurrected in order for the discussion of the virgin birth to be happening in the first place, are not only more evidence of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but included within them are incidences of divine power unparalleled by any prophet, teacher or spiritual leader. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the only time in history where the Creator God literally entered into human existence in order to display his unlimited power over creation in the man of Jesus Christ. The Gospels document these moments by those who witnessed the divine power firsthand, as John recounts:

 1 John 1-4:  That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete.

Thus we find ourselves in a place where the Ascension, Resurrection and Crucifixion of Jesus Christ have been given solid footing in historical fact. Now we find ourselves in a place where the Gospels and the writers of them have been given historical validation as being the source of a life lived by the man Jesus Christ from a place of eyewitness testimony.

Tuesday Devotional: James 2

Devotional

bibleRead James 2:1-18

Submission is at the heart of obedience.  And contrary to popular belief, obedience does not limit or confine, as much as it potentially liberates.  The difference between an obedience that oppresses and an obedience that liberates is in the will of the one who obeys.  If the obedience is ultimately for the sole benefit of the leader at the expense of the one obeying, this obedience will only benefit one party.  If the obedience is for the greater good of the whole and both parties benefit from the obedience, then the obedience can be a means to liberate rather than imprison.  Everything about the life of a Christian revolves around this state of complete submission.  There is no life or union with Christ if there is no submission.  Along the road of discipleship exists only one shepherd with one voice, and the sheep that follow after and listen for that voice have only one choice once they hear it: submit to his authority, and follow. 

This, however, is not a submission or obedience that empowers the one giving directions, while burdening the one following.  The purpose of submission to the authority of God’s voice, spirit and will is his pure desire to free us from ourselves.  Left to our own devices we will recklessly and carelessly destroy everything that surrounds us.  Our human nature is not bent to serve others with the fervor with which we daily desire to serve ourselves.  The human heart has a tendency to overlook more far-reaching implications and consequences of our own actions in trade for more immediate gratification.  We are a horribly near-sighted and forgetful creation.  We learn and then we forget the lesson.  We hear and then forget what we heard.  We follow and then forget why we were following and whom we were following in the first place.

Along with all of this, we are predictably unstable.  We stand firm and then we collapse.  We know for certain and then question everything at hand.  In the presence of God’s word and the life given us in Jesus Christ, being in a state of near-sightedness, forgetfulness or instability is impossible.  The life renewed in Jesus Christ is the opposite of all of those things.  When we allow the words of Christ to enter into our lives, and when we completely submit to him, we are made aware of certain truths that are immovable and unshakable.  When wandering makes our direction unclear, our God leads us through the desert as a pillar of fire and a cloud of smoke that is unmistakable and undeniable.

In these moments the reality of his presence in the desert of our confusion must not be taken lightly or overlooked.  The only way to miss the pillar or the cloud is if we choose to look another way or close our eyes.  Otherwise, it is there, it is real and it directs us where to go.  In times where we are tempted and our flesh prompts us to act as our old life would desire us to, the transforming power of the Spirit must receive our complete submission to turn from our old self and press forward, both with the spirit of Christ and the faith that the impossible transformation is complete in Jesus Christ.  In times of blessing, where we are overwhelmed with peace and joy in our lives, we must never forget that before we were, God already was.  We must never forget that it was his authority over creation that willed us into existence, and all of the blessings that we enjoy had their beginnings far before we ever knew we desired them.  We have been given simply because the authority of the Lord has willed us into a position to receive.  The submission and obedience required by God’s authority is not to establish a hierarchy for the sake of hierarchy.  He desires that we submit to him because if we submit to anything else, we will lose, and lose everything.  He is our protector and provider.  Submitting to his will results in our protection and provision forever, by the only one who has the means to provide what we need.

 

Tuesday Devotional: 1 Thessalonians 4

Devotional

bibleRead 1 Thessalonians 4:1-12

The process of sanctification is ongoing, and once begun, cannot stop.  The basis of sanctification is the radical departure from our sinful nature into the complete and holy nature of God the Father.  This process does not happen overnight nor does it happen without challenge and suffering.  This process is often slow and often arduous.  However, although each step is a painful tear from the world with which we have until this point been so comfortable and satisfied, each step also reveals more and more validation that the process is not only necessary but is ultimately liberating.  As we move closer and closer into a union with the spirit of Christ himself in our daily lives, we likewise move closer to the realization of the hope towards which we ultimately strive.  That hope is the realignment of this world as it is with how it was intended to be.  That hope is also the realignment of our spirit from its current state back to its created purpose.  This original creation was intended to be one with the Father in every aspect.

The process of sanctification cannot be rationed; it is always more.  To be merely content with where God has brought us “so far” is a loss.  Resigning to the fact that he can do little more with us is absolute failure.  The spirit born anew in Christ always strives to go farther and search deeper than before.  This desire for more does not arise out of a desire for mere activity.  It arises out of the realization that the more we align ourselves with the spirit of Christ the closer we will be to him.  This closeness is what produces the “wings of eagles and feet of deer” in us that allow us to soar above and beyond, or run gracefully through, the suffering of this world.  This closeness has the power to calm every storm.  The desire to do more and more with Christ is not just busywork.  The desire to do more and more is proximity.  The more we strive to be like him, the more will be one with him.

Tuesday Devotional: Colossians 1

Devotional

Read Colossians 1:1-15bible

We live in a world of abundant and overpowering distractions.  Take a moment to count how many different voices are calling out to you to do, to see, to go, to buy, etc.  Sadly, the God of all creation has a tendency to blend too easily into this crowd of voices.  We are busy beings, trying to do as many things as we possibly can every day, week, month and year.  Found within this busyness is, for many, a Sunday morning church service.  Within this service is a language so grand and powerful that for an hour we forget the limitations of this world and our spirits are infused with a hopeful confidence that seems strong enough to do just about anything.  Within that church we speak of God as the creator of the heavens and the earth.  Within that church we speak of God as the first and the last and the beginning and the end.  Within that church we speak of Jesus Christ as the redeemer who pays our debts and gives us rebirth.

This tone and these words are not normal.  We often don’t use them outside of the church walls.  In our daily lives we display an insultingly lackadaisical approach to the presence of that tone or the meaning of those words.  Do we really understand what it means to say that he was the beginning and will be the end?  Do we really understand what it means to profess faith and submit to the creator of the heavens and the earth? Do we really understand what it means when we bear the name of Christ? Are we truly identifying ourselves with the cross where Christ became the ransom for our sins?  The truth of the Gospel is extreme. It is unreasonable and illogical to react to it in any other way.  The reaction to the Gospel has to be extreme. Hearing its claims must move us to fall to our knees in complete submission.  If we profess faith in the Gospel yet live in a way not far removed from the life that preceded the encounter with the Gospel, we have misunderstood that Gospel.  If we profess faith in the God of the Bible and are yet convinced of our own power, or yet in control of the direction and course of our lives, we have misunderstood the Gospel.  If we profess faith in the cross of Christ and continue to strive for perfection, to attain salvation through our personal record, we do not understand the Gospel. 

The Gospel of Christ is extreme in its claims concerning the nature of the living God.  This God does not need us for anything, nor does he have to listen to our opinions at all.  However, he continues to use us, bless us, and listen to us because he loves us.  The Gospel of Christ is extreme in its claims about the life and sacrifice of Christ.  The message of the Cross does not give us new guidelines to improve our lives or free passes to find peace with the daily sins that plague us.  The message of the Cross is that faith in the sacrifice of Jesus creates a being different from the old, that can never go back.  There is always movement with the cross of Christ, but just as Christ carried his cross forward and never back, forward motion into deeper union with Christ is the only acceptable outcome of our faith.  The Gospel is not just another idea, voice or message amongst the thousands of messages we receive on a daily basis.  It is THE message.  It is THE good news.  To understand it for exactly what it claims requires us to broaden our scale of measurement to a point so big that at a certain point we disappear, and only Christ remains

The Impossible Religion: Purpose

Reflections

Straight-Road

source

This reflection series,  “The Impossible Religion,” reveals five specific problems that people have with the gospel of Jesus. These impossibilities arise when Christianity is a religion to achieve, rather than simply the “good news” of grace and redemption that will naturally transform us. Christianity outside of Christ’s redemption is in fact impossible, but with God nothing is impossible. For the next five weeks, we’ll go through Scriptures from five different areas of the Bible in order to confront these impossibilities:

Impossible Purpose (Revelation 4)

The Book of Revelation is one of the most difficult books in the entire Bible to read and understand.  It is filled with symbolism that is not only hard for us to picture mentally, but hard for us to understand spiritually.  Amidst the creatures, events and objects found throughout John’s vision is one simple image repeated: a Lamb on a throne.

The lamb is actually absent from Chapter 4, appearing first in Chapter 5.  However, what we do see is that the throne in the vision is important and extremely valuable.  The throne is the centerpiece of heaven.  The throne is the reason for everything surrounding it.  Without the throne nothing else matters, and nothing else makes sense.

In the first section of this series we learned about the Nazirite vow, the vow of complete and unwavering devotion to the most-high God.  We also learned that the Nazirite, in a life of selfless sacrifice and devotion, was ever aware of the shortcomings of the human heart in the “Creator-Creation” relationship.  Although these individuals devoted themselves to living for God completely, they knew that regardless of all of the sacrifices, actions and words, they could never overcome sin through deeds of their own.  The presence of sin in a life of pure devotion is due to the broken original covenant between God and man. Something had to be done in order to reconcile the sin in each of us with the overwhelming presence and purity of God.

The way in which the ancient Israelites acknowledged this need was through animal sacrifices.

When I read the Bible for the first time I was caught up on certain issues that left me scratching my head in confusion and disbelief.  Certain things made sense and certain things were understandable, albeit foreign to me.  Animal sacrifices were one issue that I wrestled with, and I eventually resigned this area of scripture as a subject left in mystery.  I simply could not understand the need or purpose for such unthinkable amounts of animal death.

I love meat (and I actually love lamb). However, my animal-loving self sided with all of these helpless lambs being sacrificed for the sake of human sins.  It simply did not seem fair.

Imagine you pull out of a parking lot and scratch the car parked next to yours, causing visible damage.  As you evaluate the damage done to the other car, the owner of the damaged car arrives and sees that you are responsible for the damage. You have been caught as the responsible party, and prepare yourself for the repercussions.  But the owner spots a young child walking by and places the responsibility of paying for the damage on her (stay with me here). Now, the owner claims, it is the child’s responsibility to pay for the damage.

Naturally, we would protest and demand that the responsibility be placed back where it belongs, and to let the child go free.

This is how I viewed the lambs.  I felt that to put the mistakes of a man on the life of an innocent animal seemed cruel and unfair.  Until, that is, I found what awaited me on the hill called Golgotha.

There are many references to Jesus as a “lamb” in the Bible, whether directly or through implication.  John the Baptist referred to Jesus the first time he saw him as, “the Lamb of God.”  Isaiah referred to the Messiah as being, “led like a Lamb to the slaughter.” Also, Jesus hosted a Passover dinner with his disciples that distinctly required the presence of Lamb on the table to be served, however, at this particular Passover meal there was no Lamb to be found except Jesus saying that it was his duty to be “broken for them.”

The timing of Jesus’ execution was also interesting, given that on the Passover the Lamb was to be sacrificed by each family to remember the protective qualities of the Lamb’s blood on the doorframes during the Exodus that protected each Israelite from the plague of death and brought them into new life in the promised land.  Each sacrificed Lamb on Passover was to be sacrificed without defect or broken bones.  In an attempt to hasten the death of the criminals adorning the crosses on Golgotha, the knees of all but one were broken.  Jesus’ bones were left untouched. Not until I saw Jesus fulfill the role of the sacrificial Lamb did I gain perspective on the animal sacrifices of the Old Testament.

I reflected on my sympathy for the innocent lambs, and was confounded by the fact that hanging on the cross was not an animal, nothing in common with myself.  The sacrifice hanging on the cross was a human being.   This man understood the words of those who sacrificed him.   He understood the realities of the suffering and injustice he was facing.  Above all, he was slaughtered with love and prayers on his lips for those who deserved no such compassion.  He had no place being hung from a tree, and every right and reason to demand justice and freedom from such a responsibility.  Yet, the story unfolded differently: “the Lamb” remained silent.

In Revelation 4, we find a magnificent throne, adored and praised by all in its presence.  On the throne sits a Lamb who willfully gave his life for a creation that willfully chose to sacrifice him.  It is the throne toward which all Scripture points, and it is on the Lamb who occupies it that all creation rests.  Without the Lamb, without Jesus, Christianity is in fact an “impossible religion.”  Without Jesus we are instantly overburdened by the expectations of our faith.  Without Jesus, the standards are impossible to reflect in our daily lives.  Without Jesus, we will never trust this stranger God with our everything.  Without Jesus, we will never be changed by the claim of resurrection beyond momentary inspiration or habitual tradition.  Without Jesus, the purpose of our lives, why we are called to live the way we are, will ever remain unknown to us, and will collapse under doubt and distrust.

Christianity is not an impossible religion.  At its center is a God who came to us as Jesus Christ in order to share with us “the good news.”  This good news claims the power to transform a life that goes beyond our power to change ourselves.  Because of the slain Lamb, this “good news” claims things that no other religion dares to.  The God of creation lowered himself to be one with us.  He called himself Immanuel, God with us.

As the final hours of his life drew near, Jesus told Governor Pilate that “everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”  Christianity is impossible only if we refuse to listen to this truth.  If we choose to stop and listen to the message, Christianity has the power to achieve the impossible.

The Impossible Religion: Power

Reflections

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source

This reflection series,  “The Impossible Religion,” reveals five specific problems that people have with the gospel of Jesus. These impossibilities arise when Christianity is a religion to achieve, rather than simply the “good news” of grace and redemption that will naturally transform us. Christianity outside of Christ’s redemption is in fact impossible, but with God nothing is impossible. For the next five weeks, we’ll go through Scriptures from five different areas of the Bible in order to confront these impossibilities:

 

Impossible Power (Mark 16)

In Mark 16, what Jesus had been promising all along had finally come true.  The stone was rolled away and what he foretold would happen actually happened.  He was risen.  He was the Christ.  He was who he said he was.

If, that is, you believe the Gospel account.

What happened on that third day is amazing, yet for many, impossible to believe.  The idea that Jesus could resurrect himself and then appear for forty days teaching, speaking, eating and living in human form seems like a myth or fairytale: fun to talk about but foolish to have faith in.

The world we live in simply does not work that way. When we die, we die.  But if you read the Gospel of Mark for fifteen chapters before reaching that final sixteenth chapter, you will have already encountered a Jesus who claims to be removed from this life and beyond our understanding of it.  Throughout each of the four gospels Jesus consistently tells us that he is “The Life.”

Initial reactions to the resurrection often take two forms, one from the side of belief and the other from non-belief. Both are incorrect in their foundations.

For many Christians, the reading of the Passion narrative, ending in the empty tomb, is a tradition to honor and a story to recite.  Reading about the Resurrection is similar to watching the end of “Sleeping Beauty.”  How nice, we think, how romantic. Wouldn’t it be nice if life were really like that?

To my knowledge, no one has ever finished watching “Sleeping Beauty” saying, “Isn’t it great that that happened!  How amazing! I wish I could have been there to see it!”  If someone were to react that way, we would respond to them in judgmental, sympathetic and annoyed disbelief.  We all know that “Sleeping Beauty” is a fairytale and we end the discussion there.  We aren’t wrong for doing so, because we know that the story doesn’t claim to be true and to change our lives forever.  It’s a story.  That’s it.

There are many self-professing Christians who read Mark 16 in the same way they watch “Sleeping Beauty.”  They read the story and feel nice and warm inside, but it never transcends the pages to impact their real lives.  The purpose of “Sleeping Beauty” is to entertain, to tell a made-up story.  The Gospels are different: they proclaim truth and promise change.  The apostle Paul confronts this attitude in 1 Corinthians 15, telling is that if the tomb wasn’t actually empty, if the Resurrection did not occur in fact, then everything we do as Christians is not only without purpose but is harmful, foolish and pitiful.  Living life under the belief that “Sleeping Beauty” is a true story would be something to be ashamed of, not proud.  No one, at least to my knowledge, has faced death joyfully professing confidence in the story of “Sleeping Beauty.”  Yet thousands, including eleven of the twelve original disciples of Jesus Christ, have died full of joy in the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the story of the empty tomb.

Somehow, belief in the cross is easier than belief in the empty tomb.  However, to stop at the cross makes the life of Jesus the story of a failed and dishonest teacher that does not deserve our attention or worship.   There are many other teachers and wise men throughout history who did not make the outrageous claims of deity that Jesus did, and if he were not actually who he said he was we could follow the teachings of any one of them.  However, to believe in the empty tomb means to acknowledge the life of Jesus Christ as he proclaimed it.  He called himself “the way, the truth, the life,” even “the resurrection and the life,” and to believe in Jesus Christ means to believe in life beyond the tomb.

For non-believers, the main difficulty in believing in the empty tomb originates with distrust in the Gospels.  This distrust which I myself displayed for many years comes from ignorance in the facts behind the four Gospel narratives of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Non-believers see the Gospels as simply legends that were written many years after Jesus died, and the stories, including the Resurrection, came out of the desire to create a version of Jesus that was more what the writers wanted him to be and less what he actually claimed to be.

If one takes this view of the Gospels, we have to ask several questions.  First, when were the Gospels written?  Given the span of time separating the death of Jesus and the first account of the Gospels, was there sufficient time for “myth” or “legend” to arise?  What would be the motivation for the writers to write such an account the way they did?  Lastly, what if any incentive would there be in doing that for them personally?

First up is the issue of time.  According to the most current historical and archaeological research, the general consensus is that they were written much closer to the life of Jesus than what most people believe.   Since we are focusing on the Gospel of Mark it is sensible to discuss the most widely accepted view in its original date of composition.

Most scholars believe that the Gospel of Mark was written close to 20-25 years after the death of Jesus.  For those of us outside the historical evidence arena, this might still seem like a long time passed beyond the actual events being recorded.  However, when we look at the written accounts of prominent historical figures, like Alexander the Great, we find that the earliest account of his life was written close to 300 years after Alexander’s death.  Yet, we believe that Alexander the Great lived and did the things we are taught he did.  1 Corinthians 15 has Paul receiving the story of Jesus– living, teaching, being crucified and rising from the dead on the third day– within five years of the crucifixion.  Five years!  In the historical context, that is barely a moment. To recount stories with accuracy given such a short period of elapsed time between the actual events and the recording of them is more than plausible.

Secondly, we must consider motivation and incentive.  How would writing the Gospels affect the lives of the authors as individuals?  Some imagine 21st century televangelists with white-toothed smiles and expensive suits, lining his pockets.  From this perspective, the motivation to write these stories would be to materially benefit their own lives. But this is to completely neglect the realities of their world.  For these men, to identify as a Christian was a death sentence.

To be Christian during the time when the Gospels were written meant to be threatened from all sides.  Due to the horrifying persecution from men like Nero or Diocletian, Christians were motivated to construct the catacombs in Rome and the tunnel dwellings of Cappadocia, where they could feel at least a small sense of security in their worship and Christian lives. It is in this environment that the Gospel writers wrote their “stories.”

Not only were they heavily judged and persecuted outside of Israel, they were also fought from within as their Jewish brethren attempted for years to squelch the worship of Jesus Christ.  Eventually one of the most notable preachers of the Gospel, Paul started as a prominent persecutor of the church.   We now know through the historical records that all but one disciple of Jesus were executed for their belief and continued support of the Christian church and the gospel of Jesus Christ.

By writing the Gospels, these people were literally risking their lives, and many lost their lives.

No matter who you are, your life will be defined by what you believe about the empty tomb.  Those who believe will understand that not even death is to be feared.  Those who do not see this world as all there really is.   The power of the Resurrection of Jesus is there for everyone to see and find, but the question to each person is, do you want to find it?

Tuesday Devotional: Romans 1

Devotional

Read Romans 1:18-32bible

“Punishment” is often attributed to God long before “love” or “grace.”  The wrath of God is far more interesting a headline than his humble sacrifice and endless love for those who have not loved him.  For many, the creator God is an authority figure to his inferior creation, small beneath his heavy hand.  In this vertical perception of holy hierarchy, there is far too much room for rules and consequences and far less room for love and grace.  While God has established his law and standards and there are indeed consequences to breaking them, the punishment of God is often misunderstood.  As most of us experience punishment, an act of disobedience is swiftly followed by an act of punishment intended to end the disobedience.  This is reactionary punishment.  While this approach to punishment is effective, the punishment of God is typically far more lesson driven.  God’s desire is not limited to putting an end to our misbehavior, but shows us how our misbehavior has terrifying effects on not only our own lives but others as well.  When punishment is associated merely with our own actions, isolated to us as individuals, we learn obedience and punishment in a system of self-preservation and self-service.  Godly wrath and punishment is far broader and more terrifying.  God’s punishment intends to show us that with freedom to seek the satisfaction of our human desires, we are capable of far more destruction than one single act.

Will a child learn and understand the consequences of stealing the car keys and driving the family car more if stopped before leaving the driveway, or if allowed to drive around the city for a single hour?  The first is a warning of things that could have been.  The second is an experience of consequences.  The second leaves no room for hypotheticals or what ifs.  It locates the disobedience directly within the consequences.  Therefore, the punishment of God in terms of letting us carry out our desires without correction is far more terrifying than a direct rebuke by the Lord Almighty before a false step is taken.  However, in this way we are better able to understand the purpose of his law when we face our own destructive tendencies.  Only by experiencing the dangers of our own nature can we not only accept but desire his laws, decrees and protection from ourselves.  Save us from ourselves, Lord God Almighty!