You can't summarize Jesus. Yet, we do it every day we live claiming His Name. Jesus is as much as anyone can know about Jehovah. What Jesus said was what His Father had always said. God is Truth, and everything else is false. That is, saying anything different from God is sin, by definition. Saying anything other than Jesus is a lie.
A piece of fruit did not bring death into the world, but how can you discuss something which cannot be told? Jesus said the truth must be told in parables. He spoke often about the failed fruit of Israel. Satan told Eve God was not being totally honest, that hiding things from her could not be from pure motives. If it were a man, that would be true, but God is not man. The failures of humanity are not a part of Him, because He made all things. What He made reflects Him, but is not Him. It was not about trees and fruit, but what they symbolize. If you try to take God's place, or you try to bring Him down to your level, it's called "blasphemy" and it attempts to smear God with your own sin. The fruit of taking that path, which leads through every temptation, is death.
There is no doubt plenty which God does not tell us. What He does tell us is so hard to follow, there is no way to put it in words. It requires an extraordinary miracle just to make us care. What has been revealed is more than we can handle, because nobody has replicated Jesus, yet. One of the things never explained for us is why we are held accountable, yet it must be His choice whether we come to Him. Are we free to choose? Yes. Is it up to Him? Yes. Human logic cannot reconcile that, much as it cannot reconcile anything spiritual. He is God Almighty, Creator of all things, and you are not Him. You are accountable to Him.
When emperors of old went out to visit their subjects, soldiers went out ahead, carrying the emperor's symbol of authority. Among those soldiers was the herald, who spoke for the emperor whatever it was he wanted them to know. Primarily it was a warning he was coming, and would measure their loyalty. Loyal servants would naturally make him feel welcome, honored and loved. That required cleaning, painting, road repair, or if necessary, building new roads and accommodations from scratch. John the Baptist was the herald for the Emperor of Heaven. The Lord was coming, and those who didn't demonstrate sufficient loyalty would be counted as enemies. But instead of physical infrastructure, this Emperor of Heaven wanted to see lives cleaned and built up to welcome Him. He wanted that good fruit. If they failed to produce that fruit of the Spirit, they would suffer. John's call was, "Repent!"
After His ritual baptism at John's hands, Jesus took up the same call to repent, the same warning the fruitless trees would be cut down and thrown in the fire. John had explained in somewhat concrete terms what repentance looked like for various different groups, but made a point to denounce the Jewish leadership as having no clue, no fruit. Jesus noted the Jewish leaders were the cause of Israel having no fruit. They had twisted the Law of Moses so badly they had no idea what the fruit would be. They had poisoned the tree, making the fruit deadly. He willingly showed He carried the authority of the Law by bringing the fruit of the Law which was missing in Israel: prosperity, health, security. Wherever He went, there was no material needs unmet, no condition He could not heal, no demon He could not dispatch. Further, no one could harm Him until He permitted it.
He taught the truth behind the Law: personal loyalty to God without limit and humbly responding to His Creation with the respect He said it deserved. The ultimate privilege was service to others, as a service to God. He made these demands on everyone, regardless of who or what they thought they were. The entire Nation of Israel was bound under this, with the view in mind the whole world would know who God was. Had they obeyed this way in the first place, there would have been no poverty, sickens or demonized people in the Nation. Then all nations would have come to get a piece of that salvation for themselves.
In the midst of all this, He made clear the ultimate goal was not even that high standard of Law, but to see that as the indicator of ultimate unspeakable Truth. As He embodied all that Israel should have been, so He embodied what any man could know about God. Obeying the Law would bring prosperity, health and security, but would also point the way to spiritual prosperity, spiritual health, and spiritual security. A lawful kingdom was a very good thing, but the Kingdom of Heaven was far better. Awareness of the latter pretty much required a concept of the former. Thus, Jesus called the Nation to repent under the Law, so they could begin seeing the Kingdom of God.
The ultimate paradox of truth beyond reason was the necessity of His death at the hands of His own nation. The ultimate living Revelation of God could not finalize that revealing without going away to God so His Spirit could return. As long as His flesh was upon the earth, His Spirit was confined to Himself alone. Once He ascended, His Spirit returned to His spiritual Body, the ones who embraced Him. The message goes out to all, and all humanity is accountable to the message. At the same time, only the Father grants the Son to live in us -- more paradox. God owes us no explanation, for He is justice; what He does is just by definition. The Son who was Just, died at the hands of the unjust that He might make them just by His justice. It's really none of our business to make sense of it, nor can we pretend the gospel makes sense. It makes demands altogether unreasonable. If we could understand it that easily, where would faith come into the picture?
We who follow Him must take that same message to our world. We resurrect Him in us by doing what He did, what He would do if He were born in our place. There is no doubt Jesus spent time making sure the earthly government of His people knew they were off course from God's commands, and helped the understand what was required to fix that. Still, most of His time and efforts went into demonstrating the ultimate Truth -- revealing His Father -- by being the Truth, by being the Law which points to the unspeakable Truth. He summed up in Himself the Law of Moses, and closed it down on the Cross. He proclaimed forgiveness for all the failures of mankind since the beginning. The Law of Noah still stands for all mankind until He comes back from Heaven, but the sacrifice for sins was covered on all levels. Just as Jonah knew to preach Noah to the Gentiles in Nineveh, so we preach Noah to the world as the path to comprehending the higher Truth, the Person of God and His forgiveness.
Our journey has really just begun.
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By Ed Hurst
17 May 2009
COPYRIGHT NOTICE: People of honor need no copyright laws; they are only too happy to give credit where credit is due. Others will ignore copyright laws whenever they please. If you are of the latter, please note what Moses said about dishonorable behavior -- "be sure your sin will find you out" (Numbers 32:23)