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Friday, January 4, 2013

The Living Message


The time of Jesus’ coming to earth marked the beginning of the most important stage of the plan of
salvation. God the Son allowed Himself to be transformed from the dazzling God being that He’d been
before, into what would be, by comparison, a severely limited human form, something less than even His angels are created to be. It was time for the Godhead to send One of their own into the dark, evil world that
we inhabit, the world occupied by a sinister angel rebel with nothing but murder on his mind. The human race, having been taken hostage and slowly killed off by this rebel, could be saved only by God sacrificing His Son in the place of those doomed human beings.
Jesus’ coming to earth—God the Son in human form—was the climax of the long story of Israel’s covenant relationship with God and God’s quest to reconcile humanity with Him. Jesus, the Logos, the Word of God, came to show the world what God was like. This perspective needs to be in place before we even begin to read the Gospels. We must explore every story, every parable, every miracle, every saying of Jesus with the question “What does this tell us about God?” God had already revealed Himself to His people through prophets, through the Temple system, through the written words of Scripture. But none of these revelations was able to completely capture what God was like. Only Jesus was able to do that; only Jesus is God’s living message to humanity—not just for the 33 or so years He walked the earth, but for us today.

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