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.