Have you ever wanted to be one of the first to get your hands on a new technology? Have you ever waited in line or put in a pre-order? In recent years there has been a surge in the race to be on the frontlines of technology. From the latest phones to the sleekest high-tech car, people have expressed their interest by putting their money down.
When pre-release products are distributed to leading tech writers their reviews get increased traffic. They can’t wait to get their hands on the product. They want to touch and handle it. They also want to take it apart and see what’s inside. They might actually take it apart or they might just do lots of diagnostics and pass along what they find out. There is nothing like actually having a product in hand that makes it more real.
The same is true when you have a baby. When the baby is kicking around for the first time, there is a reality to that which grows exponentially when the baby is in your arms. Some say you aren’t really married until you have children. Before children you can live as you want. After children life is different, can I get an AMEN!
John, one of Jesus’ disciples, has had the opportunity to handle the pre-release copy of the Gospel. He walked and talked with Jesus prior to His death and resurrection. And then he did the same after the resurrection. And he isn’t just being poetic. He actually heard, saw and touched Jesus. Jesus is the Gospel, the Good News.
You see, the central message of Christianity is not the teaching of Jesus. It is not the way He spoke, or the miracles He did. He did not come to bring an alternative message. He didn’t want to introduce a superior ethic. He came to give Himself, so that we could be in proper relationship with him. He is the Gospel!
So when John writes that Jesus was from the beginning and therefore the message of the Gospel was from the beginning he is telling us about the continuity of the message he received and passed along to his readers and to us by extension. Jesus is not a new thing. Even in the first chapters of the Scriptures Jesus is mentioned as the One who will crush the head of the Serpent.
John’s message is particularly important for his day and age. There was a teaching that flourished during that time that taught that the divine could have nothing to do directly with the earthly. Divine was too holy and earthly was too corrupt. There was no way for the two to meet.
So when John writes that he heard Jesus, saw Jesus, closely examined and touched Jesus, he was refuting this hyper-spiritual Gnosticism of that day. The Good News is that God added something to Himself, a human form, so that He could reconcile us to Himself. Jesus had to be fully human and fully God for the transaction to be successful. He had to be fully connected to this world. He couldn’t be a ghost of a man. The reality of His humanity was central to the message.
This is a hard message to accept because the connection of Divine and Human in Jesus is a mystery. We don’t know exactly how He can be 100% God and 100% human. The math does not add up. And yet that is exactly what is proclaimed in the Gospel. Fully God, fully man. God with us, Immanuel.
There are those today who want to extract some separate message from Jesus. They want to say the central message of the New Testament is love, not the person of Jesus. They want to downgrade Jesus to being a good moral teacher rather than the Divine Savior. In doing this they then want to make Christianity just another item on the heavenly road a la carte menu. You can choose what you like and they will all get you to heaven, or wherever you want to go. They want to say that they are all versions of the same lunch menu, all equally valid and all good with sprinkles on top.
This belief that all religions are basically the same harmless belief leads society unable to name evil. The beheading of Coptic Christians by Muslims must be watered down because Muslims are peaceful, according to their conception of the world. So it becomes a non-descript group of people doing a random act on some other non-descript group of people, with no apparent cause or connection. It is instead a group of Muslims acting fully in accord with their religious beliefs. They are being good Muslims as they cut the throats of Christians.
A time is coming when we in the West will have to stand up for Christ, and some of us will be killed. It is happening all over the globe right now. It is coming to a street near you. But be of good cheer, Jesus has overcome the world. He is real and just who He claimed to be. And John was an eye witness to that reality.
The Arnold Journey 