The Progression #2 “The Way”

In this series I wanted to share with you 14 phases you go through to experience joy and contentment in this life. I covered the first four previously in “The Progression #1”. If you have not read #1, I suggest you ready it prior to #2. To recap the first four phases: the 1^st is “You must acknowledge that God is”; 2^nd is “You must acknowledge that God is good”; 3^rd is “You must acknowledge your sin and your need for mercy”; and the 4^th is “You must acknowledge and confess that Jesus is now Lord of All and Savior of your wounded heart through His willingness to die on a cross and that God proved it through raising Him from the dead”. Phase 4 is so critical to this progression that I feel compelled to spend more time to add to your understanding before I move on to phase 5. Like a veil dividing darkness and light, it must be crossed, or you will forever be blinded not being able to see what those in the light see plainly. I previously emphasized the incredible love God displayed towards us through His son’s willingness to die for us upon a Roman cross nearly 2000 years ago. For many of us this is more than enough to tug on our hearts and help us embrace such a loving Father and Savior, but for others their head gets in the way of such a leap of faith. Faith is a principal element within the Kingdom of God and very few things happen without it. However, God does not require us to enter His Kingdom through salvation by blind faith since He went through such amazing efforts to give the whole world such profound logical evidence. He had a plan of salvation through His son Jesus already planned out before He even laid the foundations of the earth.

Imagine if you would: if there was a man living back in the early 1400’s AD maybe in Europe or Asia – back before the Renaissance or Christopher Columbus or the printing press or the invention of oil painting – who had a vision from God of the US in 2020. He then wrote down details on parchment paper about the spread of a deadly virus and the marching in the streets of the African Americans and the highly contested Presidential election and so on – details about a country and land that was non-existent and cities and a culture and a way of life that did not exist in his time. Wouldn’t that be amazing and make what we are going through seem even more remarkable? Has something like that ever happened in human history?

Have you seen the movie “The Passion of the Christ”? I believe it to be a quite accurate depiction of the remarkable events that transpired at the end of Jesus Christ’s life. What you may not realize is that so much of what was portrayed was written down and described 400 to 700 years prior to Jesus being born. Around 700-680 BC Isaiah wrote: “He was despised and rejected with deepest grief. We turned our backs on him and looked the other way. He was despised, and we did not care. Yet it was our weaknesses he carried; it was our sorrows that weighed him down. And we thought his troubles were a punishment from God, a punishment for his own sins! But he was pierced for our rebellion, crushed for our sins. He was beaten so we could be whole. He was whipped so we could be healed. All of us, like sheep, have strayed away. We left God’s path to follow our own. Yet the Lord laid on him the sins of us all. He was oppressed and treated harshly, yet he never said a word. He was led like a lamb to the slaughter. And as a sheep is silent before the shearers, he did not open his mouth. Unjustly condemned, he was led away. No one cared that he died without descendants, that his life was cut short in midstream. But he was struck down for the rebellion of my people. He had done no wrong and had never deceived anyone. But he was buried in a rich man’s grave. (Isaiah 53: 3-9) This is the best description of the death and burial of Jesus and it was written over 600 years before it happened. God wanted to make sure you would know that Jesus was his son. Isaiah and the other prophets foretold of much of Jesus’s life and death on this earth. They described him being born of a virgin in the town of Bethlehem. That he would come from the line of King David. Both Mary and Joseph traced their lineage to David. They foretold him being preceded by John the Baptist and many other details of his life were written about long before he came. So detailed were some of the things Isaiah and David wrote about in advance that many scholars in the U.S. universities started claiming in the early 1900’s that the disciples or other followers of Christ must have altered these books adding these prophecies later. At the time there were no surviving manuscripts pre-dating Christ and many started to believe these claims until 1946 when the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered. Some young shepherd boys deep in the Judaean Desert near the ancient settlement of Qumran were throwing rocks into a cave and were surprised to hear the breaking of clay pots. This led to the discovery of over 800 preserved manuscripts of the Torah or the “Old Testament” dating back to at least 200 BC. The settlers of Qumran were ancient priests who felt compelled by God to preserve and hide away many copies of the Torah in fears that the Roman Empire may someday destroy their civilization and culture and the Word of God would be lost. There were 64 complete copies of Isaiah discovered and the whole world learned that the book of Isaiah and David’s Psalms and the other ancient books of the old testament have not changed in the slightest since at least 200 years before Christ was born. I love how God works these things out in advance for us.

Most of you may know that Jesus died on Good Friday and rose from the dead Easter Morning, but did you realize that Good Friday has always been the beginning of the celebration of Passover? To the Israelite’s and those of the Jewish faith this has always been the largest of their celebrations and feasts. God established Passover the night before the Israelite nation received their deliverance from slavery under the Egyptians exactly 430 years to the day that they arrived in Egypt. God instructed the Israelite families to slaughter a lamb and place the blood of the lamb on the door post so the death angel would Passover that home sparing the life of the first born. God had Moses say to the Israelites; “This is a day to remember forever – the day you left Egypt, the place of your slavery. On this day in early spring, in the month of Abib, you have been set free. You must celebrate this event in this month each year after the Lord brings you into the promised land. (Exodus 13:3-5) God went into the details of this celebration which included that the Passover Lamb (a spotless young lamb) to be sacrificed by the High Priest and its blood poured out on the Arc of the Covenant for the sins of the people. The Israelite nation celebrated Passover like God commanded for 1400 years before Jesus came to earth. As foretold, John the Baptist preceded Jesus and began to preach the message: “clear and prepare your hearts for the coming of the Lord” proclaiming that God’s long-awaited Messiah or Savior was about to appear. John had many followers, as thousands came to him to be baptized for their sins, and God told John that He would announce and introduce Him to the world. When John saw Jesus coming to be baptized, he cried out; “Look, there He is – The Lamb of God! He will take away the sins of the world! (John 1:29) Jesus was introduced to the world as “The Lamb of God” right from the beginning. He came to die as a sinless or spotless innocent lamb to fulfill the pattern that God establish over 1400 hundred years earlier which symbolized the deliverance of an entire nation of people being set free from a life of slavery! Christ came to deliver and set free an entire world of people from a life of slavery, all willing to enter into a glorious relationship with the Father through His sacrifice. And three years after this announcement, at the age of 33, and at the very moment when the High Priest that year was sacrificing the chosen spotless lamb upon the alter within the temple, Jesus was hanging on the cross with His blood spilling from His body. Outside the city He used His last breath with the words, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” And where was that chosen spotless lamb that the High Priest was sacrificing born? In Bethlehem, a year earlier which is where all the lambs that were to be sacrificed in the temple were born in those days. Which is exactly how Isaiah described it in his prophecies over 600 years earlier.

With these and the many other prophecies fulfilled and the vast number of amazing miracles he performed, and the dramatic miracles performed by his followers it is only logical to accept that Jesus was who He said He was: “The Way, the Truth and the Life and the only way unto the Father. The Savior of the world.” Given all that God has done to make sure we could not miss His plan, it is quite illogical not to believe. Each year at Christmas nearly the whole earth celebrates and acknowledges His birth whether believers or not. The whole world will be celebrating the coming of the new year of our Lord 2021 AD in a couple days. So significant was the life and death of Jesus that all time is measured as divided between BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini) which is Latin for “in the year of the Lord”. It really does not take that much faith to confess with our mouths and believe with our hearts, what we already know to be true. “For God so loved the people of the world that He gave His one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life!” (John 3:16)

So now with your head enlighten to a few of the many facts concerning Jesus, hopefully your heart will soften towards the amazing love that God has for us all. While the world has just celebrated his, “virgin birth” let us remember why He came and what He did for us all. I encourage each one of you to gather with friends and loved ones and rent the remarkable movie “The Passion of the Christ” and watch with new wonder and amazement of the incredible plan and amazing love of God and choose to use your freewill to pass through the veil from darkness to light….