WHY JESUS CHANGED HISTORY FOREVER
“Regardless of what anyone may personally think or believe about him, Jesus of Nazareth has been the dominant figure in the history of Western culture for almost twenty centuries. It is from his birth that most of the human race dates its calendars, it is by his name that millions curse and it is in his name that millions pray.” -Jaroslav Pelikan[1]
Jesus’ initial “Tweet” if you will was:
“The time has come. The Kingdom of God has arrived!” (Mark 1:15).
And Jesus did indeed bring a Kingdom. This Kingdom has transformed the world during the last 2,000 years. In the ancient world, the teachings of Jesus and the work of the Spirit through Christians “elevated brutish standards of morality, halted infanticide, enhanced human life, emancipated women, abolished slavery, inspired charities and relief organizations, created hospitals, established orphanages, and founded schools.”[2] During the middle ages, it was Christians who invented colleges and universities, and Christianity provided the basis for science and the dignity of every human that underlies our system of democracy. At every stage in world history over the last 2,000 years, followers of Jesus have preserved and changed civilization, especially during the darkest of days.
Why has Jesus so profoundly changed human history? Why is Jesus, this peasant carpenter/teacher from a backwater village, the most important person in history?
I think there are two reasons why Jesus changed everything.
JESUS CHANGED EVERYTHING BECAUSE OF HIS DESCRIPTION OF GOD
Jesus was a master storyteller and a master of metaphor. He taught in stories called “parables.” Parables are extended metaphors, told in story form to draw us into making a decision about this God whom Jesus describes. In a sense, each of Jesus’ parables answer the haunting question, “What is God like?”
Jesus shared a lot of pictures of God. Some of these pictures were a retelling of the Old Testament images: God is indeed a shepherd, a bridegroom, a judge, and a king. Some images were shockingly new: God is like a farmer, a fisherman, a businessperson, a searching woman, a traveler, a cook, and a wine grower. But it wasn’t so much the new images of God that made Jesus’s teaching so different; it was their extravagance!
Jesus described God in ways that were so much more in every way–so much more seeking, loving, powerful, near. What our longing hearts hope God is like is how Jesus describes him.
According to Jesus, God is so much more than we could have conceived.
- God isn’t just a good, respectable father. He is a father that allows his son to defame and insult him, only to then run to welcome the shameful son home with kisses and a party!
- God isn’t just a shepherd, but one that searches all over the wilderness for just one lost sheep and can’t contain his joy as he carries his found treasure on his shoulders.
- God is the one that dances in front of the angels in heaven when the farthest one from God returns to him.
- God isn’t just a king who rules from a distant land, but a king that throws a wedding party for his son and invites everyone to the feast, good and bad alike.
- God is like a king that is filled with pity and forgives a servant of a $1 million debt, but then demands the servant have a forgiving heart toward someone that owes him just a few hundred bucks.
- God is like a patient farmer who doesn’t manufacture his crop in a lab but is content to scatter life-giving seed and let the soil either receive or reject it. But the soil that does receive it? That soil produces an outrageous crop—100 times what was sown!
- God is like a grape grower who is so generous with his money that he will pay the last workers of the day, who only worked 15 minutes in the field, the same wages as those who worked all day. This farmer then asks those all-day workers to have the same generous spirit he has!
- The God Jesus describes is so much more loving, generous, and caring than we dared even to imagine. He notices the good we do when nobody else does and sees into our secret motives and desires. He not only knows every star in his far-flung universe; he knows the number of hairs on your head and knows exactly what you need even before you ask him.
Because God is so unexpected, Jesus’ stories have shocking, unexpected endings. The humble tax collector is considered righteous, not the religious guy; the foreign Samaritan is the one that acts like a neighbor, not the temple priest; the prostitutes enter the kingdom of God, not the religious establishment. The greatest is the one who serves others; the humble will be exalted and the proud sent to the end of the line. You have a better chance of recognizing the Kingdom of God by being childlike than by being an ambitious over-achiever. In fact, you can acquire the whole world and lose your own soul. So those who recognize God’s loving kingdom, like a merchant in search of fine pearls, will gladly sell everything they have to buy that pearl of greatest price. Jesus’ extravagant and shocking images make us rethink the ways we have boxed God into our own imaginations.
But even more shocking and extravagant than Jesus’ descriptions of what God is like is the second reason Jesus changed everything.
JESUS CHANGED EVERYTHING BECAUSE HE SAID, “I AM” WHAT GOD IS LIKE, AND PROVED IT
Jesus didn’t just tell us what God is like; he wasn’t just a prophet or a “spokesperson” for God.
- In Jesus, God himself showed us exactly what he is like.
All of God’s promises in the Old Testament have now come to fulfillment; God has demonstrated with unimaginable clarity the full extent of his love for humans. God has indeed seen our misery, heard our cries, and he has actually “come down” to rescue us and carry us into flourishing lives. Although God spoke in many ways in the Old Testament, he has now spoken to us face to face, and we have come to know the glorious Shekinah Presence of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 4:6). Although we caught glimpses of the hesed (grace) and emet (truth) of God in the Old Testament, grace and truth are now fully expressed in Jesus Christ. “The Torah was given through Moses; grace (hesed) and truth (emet) came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, but God, through becoming a human himself, has made himself known” (John 1:17, 18).
Jesus didn’t just describe what God is like in parables; Jesus himself is the parable! And the parable is real.
In Jesus, God put his money where his mouth is. In Jesus, God proved that he is “with us” in every way, that he will not be without us, that he desires to dwell with us, that he is a covenant maker and a covenant keeper, no matter what the cost to him. This is just like the God of the Old Testament to do what he did in Jesus. Here at last is the mystery that God kept hidden for ages past but has finally been revealed.
Here at last is God “come down,” God “with us.” Here at last is exactly what God is like. When God revealed himself fully, he came in the most humble, unobtrusive, approachable manner possible. He came in the form of the lowly country carpenter, born into relative poverty in a backwater village. He came as one who had the legitimacy of his birth questioned. He came as one to whom anyone, at anytime, anywhere, can relate, because he is on our level. He came as one who is with us.
WHY DID GOD CHOOSE THIS WAY?
Why did God choose this way? Because he wants every human to have the choice to decide for or against him. And here’s the kicker: what type of God do we get to choose from? God has put forward for us to see Jesus as the God we should decide about.
George Buttrick, a pastor and teacher, used to tell the story of his students coming to him and saying, “You know, I just don’t believe in God.” And Buttrick would respond “What kind of God do you not believe in. I might not believe in him either.” And then Buttrick would tell them about Jesus.[3] Jesus is the exact expression of all that God is. The question is not “Is Jesus God-like,” but “Is God Jesus-like?” As Brennan Manning writes, “We cannot deduce anything about Jesus from what we think we know about God; we must now deduce everything about God from what we know about Jesus.”[4]
THE TRANSCENDENT AND THE INTIMATE MEET
This, at last, is the “With us God.” The God who knows every detail of our lives, the God who is constantly with us. Something in me says God must be like that, or else God would not be “God.” But if God were to really be with us, then he must be with us in every way. There is no use in saying he feels our pain unless he has felt our pain. To be with us, he must somehow feel the sting of death and betrayal and lost love and ridicule and loneliness. He must enter the sweat and tears and stoop down. We want, and need, not only the Mighty Warrior God, triumphing over evil, but we need the Merciful and Gracious God, forgiving our evil. We need the Transcendent and the Intimate together. “When we listen for the call of the Beyond, we listen with the silent and secret hope that the call comes from within as well as without. We want the Beyond and the Intimate to meet each other in the depths of our own person. The testimony of…Emmanuel—meaning “God with us” —is that they do.”[5]
If you are wondering about God, whether or not to believe in Him, whether he fits within your system of justice, please look at Jesus. In Jesus, God has taken away every excuse we have to believe or not to believe in God. In Jesus, we have a God who comes to us, who sweats and cries with us, who prays the prayers of God-forsaken aloneness that we feel. In Jesus, we see that we have a God who is with us in everything that we experience.
The last recorded words of Jesus still ring true: “I am with you always, even to the end of time” (Mt. 28:18).
You can read more of this “Jesus God” in Meet God (Before You Die), available at https://store.bookbaby.com/book/meet-god-before-you-die and on Amazon.
[1] Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 1.
[2] Alvin J. Schmidt, Under the Influence: How Christianity Transformed Civilization (Grand Rapids: Zondervan,2001), 8.
[3] Quoted from Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995), 264.
[4] Brennan Manning, Ruthless Trust (San Francisco: Harper, 200), 88.
[5] Ted Peters, God—The World’s Future (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 89.