LENT 2014 - DAY 6

I FEEL ABSOLUTELY COMPELLED TO GO BACK TO THE BASICS.  That is what I have heard football coaches say when their team isn't performing well....  Back to the basics to me means the book of John.

Of course, back to the basics also includes back to the beginning...Genesis 1:1...in the beginning God....  That's all that matters to me as a foundation.  I don't care how long God took to do what He did.  While I believe in a 6-day creation, if God used 'days' allegorically for eons, I don't care....   I just care that He did it.

Yesterday my husband brought up (again) how preposterous the story of Creation and the story of Noah are.  I agreed that we don't know enough to make complete assessments of those events.  Others will bring up questions of 'whom' Cain married, or the population growth of the earliest inhabitants according to Biblical accounting.  I don't have all of the answers - but what really matters is what we do with Jesus.  And that is what I told him.

So - - let's explore the most basic of basics:

God is plural.  From the beginning He was, and is, and is to come I AM.  In retrospect we can speak of the pre-incarnate Christ, because Messiah is God, and always was, even though He didn't acquire the name 'Jesus' until His human birth.  It is a lot to wrap our finite brains around no matter how wise the scholar, and is one of those areas where it is the child who informs the man.

The bottom line each of us has to explore is "What will YOU do with Jesus."  That is going back to basics!

John 1:1-5 says, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.   He was in the beginning with God.  All things were made through Him and without Him was not anything made that was made.  In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.  The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

That says a LOT!  Jesus is the Word.  He is God.  He and the Father are one....  Three personalities or reflections of one entity.

I love the visual God gave me for that when I was writing the children's musical A LETTER FROM G. O. D. - - H2O.  Ice, water, steam are all H2O, but they are viewed in 3 very distinct ways.

This is the bottom line of Christianity.  Some religions say He was only a prophet.  Others say He was only human and became God, and teach that others can do that as well - - but that isn't what He says through His Word, the Bible.  If we want to know Jesus, we have to know Him through His own confessions and claims.  That's a basic truth of Christianity.  He is identified in John as "The Word" and He speaks to us through His Word.   He speaks other ways as well, but He never tells us anything that goes against His written Word.

This brief passage of scripture tells us that Jesus is life and light.  He shines in the darkness - and the darkness cannot overcome Him.

What is darkness?  It is the absence of light.

Back to the basics!