Who is Jesus?

Posted on by albrooke

Before all else, Jesus is God. 

He did not become a god, or receive godhood, nor was he a created being.  He was with the Father and Holy Spirit before the creation of the universe.

But in order that we might understand who God is, he entered his own creation, and became a man, without giving up his divine nature.  He lived a sinless life in that part of the world that was governed by Herod the Great under Roman rule.

Eventually, he was brutally executed by the secular government for the supposed religious crime of declaring himself to be the Messiah, the Promised King from David’s line.

In an event both unprecedented and predicted, God vindicated Jesus and restored him to life.  His death recalls the sacrificial system which covered the sins of those in covenant with God.  Because he was a man without sin and because he went willingly to death, his sacrifice was sufficient to erase the sins of all who come to the Father through him.

12/10/2012

More on Miracles

Posted on by albrooke

This book is more than an argument that miracles still occur, it is a collection of miracle stories, too.  Metaxas relates accounts from people he knows, making this very different from C.S. Lewis’ book of the same name.

Strong drink for twenty-first century, first-world believers.

Like and unlike

Posted on by albrooke

Jesus was a human being, a Jew in Galilee with a name and a family, a person who was in a way just like everyone else.  Yet in another way he was something different than anyone who had ever lived on earth before.  It took the church five centuries of active debate to agree on some sort of epistemological balance between “just like everyone else” and “something different.”

Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew 24 (Zondervan 1995).