– A primer for beginners/A reminder for waverers –

(with editing help from a sister in Christ, Lynda Janzen)

We are the foot soldiers of Yahusha Har Mashiach, the God-man we Christians call ‘Jesus the Messiah, Christ the King, and Son of God.’ Down through the ages of His church, we have worked, within the power of the Holy Spirit, to help soften the stony hearts of multitudes.

Even as this age, that is, the world as we know it, passes, many millions remain ‘in Christ.’ However, at this time, this world of fallen man remains the province of Har Shatan, Satan. For the time being, it is to remain under his governorship. God, however, has placed definite time limitations upon the reign of the usurper until the ‘harvest’ of Christ Jesus is brought in.

I have prayed that this series might strike the heart of at least one who, with heart softened by the Holy Spirit, opens like the ‘Rose of Sharon.’ We writers speak with many voices but only one message. A fervent, humble prayer that ‘even just one more’ might receive the gift of atoning grace that will receive them into a joyous reconciliation with God.

‘Reconciliation’ is a term that can be defined as a situation in which two people or groups of people become friendly again after they have argued or who, previously in conflict, agree to make amends or come to a truce.

Oh, how well the definition describes the two sides in this pre-eternal conflict! Mankind, invariably the antagonist, is locked into a state of denial that refuses to acknowledge sin within themselves or, if acknowledged, to attempt reconciliation that recognizes the part that God will and must always play.

And as the antagonist, mankind attempts to remain locked within denial of God, placing ‘self’ above all. In doing so, man is immediately unable to discern the unequal nature of the conflict in which he, within the plurality of his created gender, has so foolishly engaged.

Fallen man, within the stricture of his denial, cannot ‘see’ God as omnipotent, powerful beyond measure, and the one who holds within His own hand all the ‘cards in the deck.’ Indeed, He is the one who fashioned the ‘deck’ and who knew from the start every card within it.

Our eternal Father could never be called ‘antagonist.’ By even acknowledging Him as ‘Father,’ we opine that He is ever-willing to offer terms for a truce through His Son, Jesus Messiah, that allows the conflict to cease forever. The ‘offer’ and its ‘terms’ are always on the table. They remain so until we draw our last breath of the life He breathed into us at birth. At that point, life in flesh extinct, ‘Last Card Louie’ (man) has played all the cards in his hand. He has passed from life in flesh toward the Second and final, endless death God has set for deniers.

The series has, at its core, yet another attempt to portray the love and compassion that is God in all that He personifies. We have shown that in all that God did throughout the process of creation, He found it to be good, He took divine pleasure in His handiwork, and from that time, upon the ‘Sixth Day’ that He created man-kind, He loved him. That love has never ceased.

That love also took the form of extraordinary care and concern as, for instance, where God placed the man to live (Eden), and also later when He gave the woman to man, sharing in Adam’s joyous response.

When God visited the sin resulting from the temptation, His love took the form of the righteous anger experienced by any father in the face of great disobedience to a situation that would cause both harm and grief to his children. And when a harsh discipline had to be applied, that is, the expulsion from the Garden and all that which fell upon man as the result, it was in fact discipline that was applied as the punishment and not the usual finality of retribution. For ‘retribution’ is an act of vengeance for a wrong or criminal act and more often brings not just separation but immediate death.

Not so with the serpent whom God cursed. Here we see not discipline but divine retribution. Such is the power of curse. Yet God only decrees retribution as the righteous condemnation for the finality of our refusal to humble ourselves, repent and accept all the gifts of the ‘heavenlies’ meant to flow to us.

Without scholarship, I therefore scribe only as a fallen sinner who, having repented a life of evil, has given himself to God in the sure and certain knowledge of having received thereby the atoning grace that only my Christ can grant within the power of His Father’s name.

Ultimately, this atonement of redeeming grace, bought with the pure blood of His Son, will restore all who have received it to the innocence and grace enjoyed by Adam as he walked in the company of God amidst the Garden.

Upon Christ Jesus, the rock of my salvation, I rest faithfully in the belief that within His loving arms, my God has reconciled my soul for his own.

Friends: what God did for me through Jesus, He will do for you. Reset the blades of the Plantation shutters of your heart so that the window of your soul becomes flooded with the light of goodness and grace. No one who asks is denied. Only your own denial forbids entry.

May your soul soon come to experience this.

WHO IS THIS JESUS?

The Deity of Christ

John 1: 1-2 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.”

And again at 14a:

The Incarnation of Christ

“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”

Jesus has always been.

He is part of what we know as the Trinity. That God, in His omnipotent power and might, so far and beyond our minute comprehension, has a persona of three faces (a face in three equal parts), and they are co-eternal in reach, omnipotence and power.

God is:

– The Father Creator of all things known and unknown.

– He is the Son whom, in flesh, was sent by God to redeem us from our brokenness.

– And he is the Spirit of utmost holiness.

Though we still lie broken in our fallen state, God loves us so much that in His Holy Spirit, He became our ‘great counselor.’ He remains with us as a constant defense against the work of the fallen one, Satan. And He has promised to be with us until the end of this current age, ‘the era of Christ’s Church,’ which is now passing away.

We may call it our ‘conscience,’ and ancient Hebrew sages spoke to it as ‘reason.’ I refer to it as my ‘inner voice!’ And through it, I am completely convinced that through faith and grace, I am permitted to communicate directly with God through Jesus. My life thereby is at all times guided by the Holy Spirit Himself. When we listen to our conscience or to reason, as we contemplate choices of good or evil, it is He who whispers, “This is not your best choice. Go back! You’re about to go the wrong way!”

Be then in no doubt: This triune God (God in three persons) is with us constantly.

1 Peter 1:20

“He was foreknown before the foundation of the world but was made manifest in the last times for the sake of you.”

Jesus existed before God laid down the foundations of this present world. And as He is God Himself, He was with God in the ‘Beginning.’ i.e., ‘of everything in subsequence that God made by his own omnipotence.’

Manifest to us in flesh, Jesus came into existence in human form. And this, at the will of His Father Who had determined to reconcile fallen mankind back into the loving relationship He had commenced. That relationship was rent (not irrevocably broken) by the woman succumbing to the temptation set before her by Satan.

Adam, however, bore the ultimate responsibility for both his own behavior and that of his helpmate. Through Adam, all mankind continues to suffer the consequences of our separation from God.

That situation is forever rectified when Jesus, the perfect paschal lamb of sacrifice, freely gave up His life in flesh to suffer and die for us on the Cross.

Jesus is the only ‘way.’ He is the means through and by which reconciliation with God is made possible. This ‘way’ to God is found by submitting the whole of our life to being in the ‘will’ of God — Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

God himself decreed that the blood of one sinless ‘man’ would become a ‘once and for all’ sacrifice to atone for sin. This sacrifice would buy the redemption of anyone of any color, religion, or even lack of belief who would seek it, in repentance, through His Son.

Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit of God Himself and was born of a virgin. In this way, He was born sinless, and the seed of fallen man was not found in Him.

For his thirty-three years, inclusive of the three years of his ministry, he lived a life of spiritual and temporal purity. In that state, Jesus was eminently a suitable sacrificial offering, whose blood, unsullied, was completely acceptable to God. Thereafter, it would wash clean the sinful denial of any repentant sinner who called upon the name of Jesus.

It is of the utmost importance that we understand what this sacrifice represented.

Once a year, under the Law of Moses, as given by God, unblemished lambs of absolute purity, of constant color with no spots and no blemish of any kind were sacrificed. Death was by the knife, and it was their blood that washed away the sins of the people. And their bones were not to be broken. The sacrifice was their blood because blood is the essence of life within the flesh of all beings.

No bones of our Savior were broken, either through the scourging He underwent or His suffering on the Cross.

Note this well:

It is the blood of man that is sacred to God. That is why it is abominable to ‘sinfully’ slay another, e.g., murder, abortion et al. The significance of this is that life within all flesh exists in and because of the blood.

It was the ‘unblemished’ blood of Jesus that constitutes the eternal and divine nature of His sacrifice. Scourged by the flailing of His body at the hands of Pilate, and later when the spear was plunged into His side by the Centurion, His blood flowed freely.

God the Father had proclaimed that only the pure, unstained blood of a perfect, sinless man was capable of washing the stain of our fallen flesh of corruption from any of us. To attain it, we would need to seek and proclaim it through and in the name of Jesus.

That was the price He paid for us!

Corruption of our fallen state lies imprinted within our DNA. It is carried by our bloodstream. God placed it there as he expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden. Only God can remove the impurity that stains our seed.

The atoning grace granted us through Jesus is the means through which this must occur. There is no other way back to God. It is the only way through which we may be redeemed. It is the only way our souls can be translated to heaven within a new, glorious and glorified body following our resurrection.

What is to happen to the redeemed in Christ is exactly what happened to Jesus Himself and is why He is called the first-fruits by Apostle Paul (1 Corinthians 15:20).

What a God! What a Savior – Jesus Messiah, lover of our souls.

Maranatha,

Denis Bowden

denisjbowden@gmail.com

Summary: Paul’s sermon before the men of Athens began with a topic familiar to all of them, and that was the common bond of religious belief and practice in their respective cultures. Jesus demonstrated it throughout the Gospels, and it is a biblical pattern for effective evangelism.

This month (June) will have marked forty years (1981) since I traveled to India on vacation, away from the business of the McDermott Fabrication Yard in Dubai, where I worked as an oil rig sandblaster and painter. I had moved there in early 1980 to live with my dad and to do some maturing of character away from people my age. I learned the value of hard work, how to read blueprints, do calculations and cost estimates of projects, supervise and train new workers, handle corporate management, and learn the customs and culture of the country, as well as how to steer clear of legal difficulties and handle the fact that I was a Christian living in a Muslim nation and to respect their beliefs.

I learned enough Arabic phrases to get by and appreciated the food and the hospitality of the nationals. I made it a point to be with the workers in the yard and be friendly with them. I worked with people from Jordan, Iran (those who had fled after the fall of the Shah), Iraq (before Saddam), Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the UK, and other nations except Israel (long before the Abraham accords of 2019-2020).

My stepmom (Mom no. 2) is from India, and specifically the city of Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay, and was born in the last years of British rule. She had decided to go back to Mumbai, New Delhi, and other cities to buy varied artwork and handcrafted goods to take back to the U.S. to open a store specializing in Eastern imports. She had left Dubai a few days before I left to go to New Delhi.

I got horrendously sick for a couple of days while there but got the opportunity to see the Taj Mahal, Gandhi’s home, open-air markets, the abject poverty, and numerous statues and altars dedicated to the multitudes of Hindu gods and goddesses. I saw an altar to the death god Kahli (Remember Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom?), gurus, “holy men,” and met people who were Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, Zoroastrians, and even fellowshipped with a few brethren in the LORD.

I had learned some Hindi and Urdu and how to greet and converse with those of different faiths and customs. When I told them that I was a Christian, the fact that I had taken the time and effort to learn their particular customs and language helped tremendously when I got the opportunity to tell them about Jesus and the Bible.

I say all of this to remind my fellow Americans (and those around the world reading this message) that we have nationalities and groups who have differing customs, beliefs, practices, traditions, and languages living here now; those of us who follow the Lord Jesus must realize that in order to get the Gospel to these dear souls, we are going to have to get somewhat familiar with the things they do and say even if it seems unusual or takes us out of our “comfort zones.”

This kind of situation is nothing new. Look at Acts 17:22-23 where Paul is about to address the men of Athens concerning Jesus and salvation. Paul, being not just a Jew but also a former Pharisee, was before a group of people that not too long ago would have been avoided and condemned for their idolatry, perverse behaviors, and because they were not of his nationality (racism, anybody?). We know by reading the Bible that after centuries of occupation by the Persians, Greeks – and at that time, the Romans, many of the Jews wanted nothing more to do with Gentile rulers and pagan customs. They wanted them out of Israel and for the nation to be free under the benevolent rule of a new Davidic king/Messiah.

I can understand the apostles’ shock and awe when the Lord Jesus told them that they would be witnesses to Him in Jerusalem, but also in Samaria and the world (Acts 1:8-11). What? You mean to tell us that we have to mingle among the heathen, godless Gentiles and share the Gospel with them? Jesus answered “Yes” and made this possible through the arrival and indwelling of the Holy Spirit among the brethren at Pentecost (Acts 2:1-4), enabling Peter and the others to preach the Gospel to the Jews in the city who had come from different parts of the Roman Empire (Acts 2:38).

All right, fair enough. They needed for the lost sheep of Israel to hear about their Messiah.

When we come to Acts 10 and the conversion of the Roman centurion Cornelius, this blew Peter’s mind along with the rest of the apostles. The mercy and saving grace of Christ was available to the Gentiles! What? Again, YES! They must have forgotten the tale of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-37) and the time where the Lord Jesus had talked with the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4:6-26), healed the Roman centurion’s servant (Matthew 8:5-13; Luke 7:1-10), and to remember that dark and horrible day where the LORD was dying on the cross for our sins.

While the Pharisees and crowds – His own people – mocked and scorned Him, it was a centurion, a Gentile “pagan” who declared that Jesus was not only a righteous man but the Son of God (Mark 15:39; Luke 23:47).

Now, look back at Paul’s history before Jesus got a hold of him on the Damascus Road. His hatred and rage towards the followers of Jesus were on the same level as a jihadist in the service of ISIS, Hezbollah, or Hamas. He was a murderer, a terrorist for all practical purposes, a religious fanatic who saw anyone even slightly opposed to God (as he saw Him) as someone who did not deserve to exist. And he, no doubt, had a nasty, condescending, irritating, arrogant attitude and the determination to get the job done no matter what the cost or consequence (Acts 9:1-6, 22:1-21, 26:9-18; 1Timothy 1:12-17).

I am sure that there were a lot of believers who prayed that God would take him out and send him to hell for what he was doing to them, but there were also those praying for him to be saved by the very same Lord Jesus who had saved and rescued them from eternal death and destruction.

From Acts Chapter 9 onward, it is as the late newscaster Paul Harvey once said, “Now you know the rest of the story.” Paul was freed from his sins by the work of Jesus Christ and was the personification of the “new creation in Christ” he would describe in 2 Corinthians 5:17. Paul had once believed that by being religiously correct and ritually precise, all was good between him and the LORD, but in reality, he had been lost in sin, as were the Gentile pagans he would encounter on his missionary journeys.

Religious rituals and practices, no matter how sincere, will not get anyone into heaven nor give them the eternal peace that only Jesus can grant (John 10:28-30, 14:6; Acts 4:12; Romans 5:6-11; 1 John 1:8-10). Almighty God has provided only ONE way to approach Him, and it is through Jesus Christ (Hebrews 7:25), our real and great sinless High Priest.

Paul used the common bonds of culture, history, and the religion of the Greeks to begin his message of salvation through Christ. He made them feel at ease and used a calm mannerism in presenting the Gospel message. It kept their attention, which is an excellent pattern to establish with an individual or group so you can give your testimony or defend the faith. It is always a good idea to listen to those with whom you are sharing Christ and to find something that is mutual and interesting.

Paul was a mighty man of God, bold in his preaching and unafraid of the world’s hostility when it came to the Gospel message, but he was also a man of common sense. He trusted in the Holy Spirit to open doors and anoint him with the demeanor and tone with which to present the Good News to his audience.

This will be the opening statement of his message, and it is worth your time and effort to study as we see the world growing colder and hostile to the things of God. The Scriptures teach that soft answers turn away wrath (Proverbs 15:1). It goes for conversations, corrections, and the spread of the Good News of Jesus Christ.

Here ends the lesson.

donaldwhitchard@gmail.com

www.realitycityreverend.com