I'm forgiven!

Last time at our church's discussion, we talked about how incredible Jesus was, so full of life and love and wisdom and authority. So this week started with a bit of a shock when we found him being subjected to an unfair trial and then crucified. To make it worse, this all happened because one of his close friends had betrayed him to the Jewish religious authorities. His closest followers had come to realize that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah, or Christ - their deliverer, the Son of God and himself God, since he was one with his Father God in Heaven. His wider group of followers in the crowds also suspected that he was the Messiah and he had demonstrated this to them by riding triumphantly into Jerusalem on a young donkey, fulfilling a key Messianic prophecy just a few days previously.

So what was going on? How was it that the Son of God, the author of life who had healed thousands of people and raised several others from the dead, was being killed? Some of his friends had a little bit of understanding that this had to happen, but basically they were all asking this same question. Several of them had thrown in their lot with Jesus and given up their jobs to follow him, which now might all be coming to nothing.

It all becomes clear when we see some of the words that Jesus cried out while he was dying: "My God, my God, why have you deserted me?" At that moment, God was being abandoned by God: God the Son was abandoned by the rest of the Godhead - his Father and the Holy Spirit. Jesus, who was God and man, was left on his own, forsaken by his Heavenly family and rejected by the world, while enduring an agonizing death.

We are the sinners. We deserve death. We deserve to be abandoned by God in Hell. Jesus had done nothing wrong, as his judge, Pontius Pilate, knew only to well. However, only a perfect human sacrifice could prevent that and no one is perfect. Jesus was that perfect man who lived a sinless life and died to take the punishment for our sins - death and abandonment by God, so he had to die. On the cross Jesus endured what we should so that we can be set free from the penalty for the way we have lived - the wages for our sin - death and Hell.

But had it worked? Had Jesus taken away the power of death to separate us from God? His followers had to wait two days. They had for the most part given up hope and were preparing for his final burial, when suddenly he triumphed over death and walked out of the tomb where his dead body had been placed over the weekend, in a blaze of light, accompanied by angels and an earthquake. Death and Hell had not been able to hold onto Jesus because he himself was sinless. He had risen to new life which he now could share with us.

When Jesus rose from the dead, he proved that you and I have been forgiven for everything that we have ever done wrong and that we can live a new life in him.

You and I, and everyone else in the whole world over all time, were forgiven all our sins on that first Good Friday when Jesus died on the cross. To receive Jesus' resurrection life - eternal life beginning now and then extending into Heaven after our physical bodies die - we just need to acknowledge that we have sinned, believe that Jesus is the Son of God, whose death and resurrection was for the forgiveness of our sins, turn our lives round to follow him and declare that he is our Lord. Then we are saved from the eternal consequences of our past and pass from death to life. We can stand with open lives and let God's goodness rain down on us.

There was an exercise given out at the end of the evening, to help us to map the ups and downs of our spiritual lives. For anyone who might find it useful, particularly if you are not sure that you have ever turned your life around to follow Jesus, then the exercise can be found here.

Jesus the amazing man

Our church's discussion on the Life of Jesus brought home just how incredible his time on Earth was. Living in Israel as a largely itinerant minister, he would have been familiar with the view of the Dead Sea above. In this setting he worked for three years and changed the world forever. For our group, bringing together several of the main aspects of who He was and what He did in just over an hour was a fairly mind-blowing experience.

To public perception, he was a man who taught with an authority that made you sit up and listen. Unlike the other religious teachers of the day, who largely explained the Old Testament in terms of a set of rules and even added more rules about how to obey the original ones, Jesus really knew what it was all about and told the crowds how to apply the Old Testament to their lives to change them as people (Matthew 7:28,29). He was down the line about the need to be good - he even said, 'Be perfect,' on one occasion (Matthew 5:48) - yet he showed great compassion for those who had messed up their lives, even in fairly major ways (e.g. John 8:1-11). On the other hand, he gave short shrift to those who thought that they were good people, but just used that to boss others around. "Woe to you ...," was one of his common starting points in that case, and he sometimes finished by talking about the weeping and gnashing of teeth in Hell. Jesus was totally uncompromising to those unwilling to listen to his message, while desperately kind to those who wanted to follow his teaching but struggled.

That, though, is just about being a very good teacher. He went way beyond that. He healed thousands of people just by touching them, or sometimes not touching them, or even by accident when they touched him because he was so overflowing with power (Luke 8:43-48). He could heal those who had died as well, raising people back to life (e.g. Luke 7:11-17). This was absolutely remarkable and his reputation grew among the crowds. His close friends, though, saw even more: he turned water into wine (John 2:1-10), walked on a lake (Matthew 14:22-33), calmed a storm by talking to it (Mark 4:35-41), and turned five loaves and two fishes into enough food for 5,000 men plus a lot of women and children, with 12 baskets of leftovers (Matthew 14:13-21). His three closest friends even saw him glow with the glory of God on one occasion (Matthew 17:1-8), and if you were in the right place at the right time you could have heard his Father God speak to him out of the sky (e.g. Matthew 3:16-17) or see a group of angels turn up to talk about him (Luke 2:8-15).

Jesus was a man of staggering power, irrefutable authority, full of life and compassion, healing bodies and forgiving sins. Yet he was not just a man, but God himself - the Son of God, but also the Son of Man, the long awaited and prophesied Messiah, with predictions about his coming to Earth recorded in the Old Testament from thousands of years previously onwards (e.g. Isaiah 53:1-12). Even some of his exact words were prophesied by King David around 1,000 years before his birth (Psalm 22:1). He taught us how to live - and led by example. He taught us not to sin - and led by example: he didn't sin, but was a perfect man.

O what a special person he was! No one else in all of history comes close to living the way that he lived and doing the miracles that he performed. And the first four books of the New Testament (the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) don't even recount his full story (John 21:15) - there's so much more about his life that we don't know. I can't wait to see what happens at our next discussion.

Thinking about sin

Last week our church's discussion was about sin. Now, don't get me wrong, thinking sinful thoughts is not a good idea! However, coming to terms with what is evil about the world and how we ourselves live is another matter. Spending 70 minutes concentrating on what's bad about us is potentially far from uplifting, but that is the reality of life and we have to recognize it. God recognized it and did something about it.

We all sin, don't we? If we're honest, we all do things that we shouldn't. Some of us are quite relaxed about that, others try hard not to do wrong, but everyone makes mistakes. There are deliberate sins, accidental sins and ones that we do because we would rather not, but are weak. Some sins are quite bad, like murder or adultery, robbing a bank etc. A lot of others don't at first sight seem such an issue. However, God doesn't see sin just as doing horrendously bad things. The relevant Hebrew word most often used in the Old Testament and the Greek one most commonly translated as 'sin' in the New Testament both mean 'miss'. We miss the mark. We miss how God wants us to live. We fall short of the glory of God, as we read in the Bible (Paul's letter to the Romans, chapter 3, verse 23). Anything that doesn't live up to God's standard is sin - and His standard is perfection (Matthew's Gospel, chapter 5, verse 48).

So why do we live like this? Because we can't help it. Right back in the beginning, Adam and Eve chose not to obey God. They lived in the Garden of Eden for maybe several decades but then were persuaded by the devil to go for something more than God had allowed. They gave up knowing just good, and absolutely phenomenally perfect good such as we can't experience today, to find out about evil as well. So it all went wrong. They became sinful by nature - and we have inherited that nature from before birth. We are born sinners and the evidence is there to prove it. From as soon as we are able to make any sort of decision, we choose at times to do what is wrong.

Put that all together and there are over 7.8 billion people in the world all missing what God wants them to be thinking and doing. This doesn't just mean 7.8 little slips each day, but wars and oppression, slavery and torture, murder, robbery, adultery and the list goes on: things that make people's lives a misery and worse, things which mess up our planet for future generations, things which ruin our own lives and cause us to be stressed, depressed, even suicidal. Perhaps an extreme example was the second world war, when around 191 countries were involved in a six year long all out fight on land, in the air and at sea, using some of the worst of all possible weapons, including atomic bombs, and subjecting their enemies to unspeakable horrors, including concentration camps. Yet that was just a very visible example of what is going on somewhere in the world, most of the time, probably actually every day.

In our own way, we all contribute to the collective evil in the world. We look at it and sometimes say, "How can there be a God with so much evil in the world?" My answer to that is, "Who does the evil?" God made the world a wonderful, good place and we have turned it into a den of iniquity. We have become a human race that is incapable of living one good life between us, so is it right to accuse God of the mess that surrounds us? No! Not at all! We are the sinners and we have disqualified ourselves from eternal life with God in Heaven. He, though, provided the solution, as our group will go on to discuss next time.