At this point in the story, things don’t look good. God’s plan for creation, with us in it, has not turned out particularly well. Life is a series of sufferings, while we try to carve out ways to contend with them and even be happy or content for various periods. For people who believe that this is all there is … that there is no supernatural reality or permanency to existence … the final arbiter of this life is death and that’s that. There is no plan other than to make do with the things this natural world offers, hoping to find lasting love and some semblance of prosperity. This makes me recall a powerful school of thought that captured the attention of Europeans and the designers of a young America called Deism. Born of the intellectual and scientific movement in the 17th and 18th centuries known as the Enlightenment, this posited that God did, indeed, create everything but he then distanced himself and now just sits back and lets us carry on all of our own. The image is one of a Watchmaker, carefully creating the mechanism and then releasing it to do what watches do. This school of thought isn’t particularly common today but still exists in some form in practical terms. I mean that there are people who believe there is a God who is all powerful but this God doesn’t really interact with me and, certainly, is a distant God because why else would there be so much suffering? I can understand this viewpoint easily.

This is not the Christian view, nor the Judaic view for that matter. Instead, God is very aware and caring for people, both generally and individually. He never stepped away and there truly is an explanation to why, all powerful as he is, he allows evil and suffering to continue. (I believe I have written of this before but may come back to it again.)

If things are not fuzzy yet, they will be soon. It’s no wonder that heads shake in disbelief that the fundamentals of this story could actually be real. So, in the telling, God chooses a people to trust him. It was a curious choice. Nowhere in humanity thousands of years ago was there a group of people who believed in a one all-powerful God. But in a region of the earth that is often referred to as the cradle of civilization there were a people, a culture and clan, that were so inclined. One of these people was a man named Abraham who somehow knew God and trusted him. To make a long story short, his trust and surrender to God’s will became the source point for the flourishing of a people later to be known as Jews. Four ages, these Jews had an up and down relationship with God, enduring a cycle of belief and unbelief, surrender and rejection. This went on and on with the account of all of this contained in a series of books which collectively came to be known as the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament (in this sense, “testament” is another word for contract). Full of stories, poems, wise teachings, and historical accounts, this collection is actually simply a depiction of God’s relationship with his people, a people with whom he had a contract or an arrangement with their best interests in mind. Another way of putting this is that this collection shows what makes God tick and what makes people tick and how the two relate to one another.

Unfortunately, things were going terribly. As hard as it is to stomach with modern sensibilities, God is a Holy God, not just a Loving God. Now, there are all sorts of ways we can define the word “holy,” but one of them is “perfect.” He is perfectly good and does not like bad or its supernatural reflection, evil. In fact, God really, really doesn’t like evil and when people choose to follow a pathway set against his plan, there are consequences. Now, this raises the specter of a God posture that really, really runs against modern sensibilities and that is a thing called Wrath. Christians are all over the map on what this means and we’ll go there in a moment. For now, imagine if you had a beloved young daughter who was seduced into following an adult predator, who stole her away to do unspeakable things to her. Your response towards this perpetrator and the situation would invariably be one of wrath. Yes?

So, Creation and Fall. A separation of God from his people. A people who just didn’t get it, despite God’s constant attempts to get their attention that life with him is what it was all about.

I don’t know about you, but I constantly look around in amazement and wonder at so many things. The symmetry of things both infinitesimally small and immense beyond comprehension. The incredible beauty of things that just shouldn’t actually exist in that form. We use the term “miracle” to represent circumstances that seem beyond extraordinary. Being a person who has partially lived within a supernatural reality since early adulthood, I have experienced the inexplicable. Seen, and lived on rare occasions, things that can have no natural explanation. None. I have sought objective scientific explanations and there can be none, other than there really does exist a supernatural reality.

I bring this up because I believe there are three supreme miracles that shape all of human reality. They are both mind-blowing and, together, provide a clear view of both God’s Grand Plan and his plan for each of us. There can be nothing more important.

They occurred in a narrow timeframe, separated by only a few decades two thousand years ago. With respect to our story, they comprise the foundation for Chapter 3 in our story, entitled Redemption.

This is going to be hard. Sort of like capturing lightning in a jar. Let’s see how to put this.

Basically, to redeem is to make things right. It’s the action of compensating for a transgression. It’s righting the scales of justice. It’s satisfying a debt. We’ve all been there in some way. An act of forgiveness is an element of redemption. We know the feeling when we’ve committed or experienced a wrong and a sense of that wrong is relieved. We are released from the power of that wrong. It disappears. A weight has been lifted. The slate is clean.

This is redemption.

Chapter 3 begins when God basically decides enough is enough. The people just don’t get it despite every attempt so far to bring them fully back into the fold. God had a final choice and it was binary. Cut his losses (who knows what calamities that would bring about?). Or, to do the seemingly impossible. Inject himself fully into humanity to show them what’s what. One last ditch effort to make things right.

We all know what purportedly happened. God became man. The sturdy fabric separating God’s place of existence from our place of existence was momentarily torn in the most unexpected way.

A brief detour but it’s important. In the Judaic tradition there was prophesy and belief in a thing called a “messiah.” This would be a man who God sent to “deliver” the nation of the Jews. A king of sorts, greater than any previous king who would usher in a permanent era where the Jews would no longer be oppressed and forsaken but would enjoy the full support of God forever. By the dawn of the first century, this was taken to mean that the messiah would effectively lead a revolt to overthrow Roman authority (the contemporary version of the historic Babylonian empire). He would be similar but greater than Moses, who with God’s support had “delivered” the people from slavery and captivity in Egypt into the “Promised Land” of milk and honey. This new and expected messiah would lead a second Exodus, but this time a permanent one. No one anticipated what actually happened.

Of all of the religions in human history … of all belief systems before and since … there is only one that holds that the actual God of all creation fully “incarnated” as a single human being. Some, like Hinduism, believe in “avatars” or examples of the many gods who end up taking on human or animal forms. This God/Man was simply not a consideration by anyone. Talk about cognitive dissonance. Talk about a game changer.

Most people in the current west and South American, half of Africa and increasing numbers of people in Asia, have some knowledge of what purportedly happened. (I say purportedly because there are many who have heard the story but believe it is myth and fantasy). And that is a baby was conceived by God in the womb of a woman, who gave birth to that baby on a day we now celebrate as Christmas. And that this baby, named Jesus (Yeshua in Hebrew or Joshua in English, meaning “salvation”) would grow up to do things that would change everything.

So, this was the first miracle: God becoming man. But the chapter on Redemption was just getting started and had a while to play out. About 33 years by the best guess.

And so, this young Jewish boy grew up in a very remote part of, itself, a remote part of the world. A backwater village called Nazareth in a distant outpost of the Roman Empire in a place we can geographically call Palestine. A lot was going on in that area and in the life of this boy at that time. I won’t go into it here. But around the age of 30, he decided to go public with his calling, ostensibly wearing the mantle of a gifted rabbi, or teacher, in the tradition of his people. And, so he found his way south from the area of the Galilee (the most notable feature of which was the large lake bearing that name, also known as Lake Tiberias to the Romans) to an extremely desolate region near the Dead Sea where he met his first cousin, John, a desert monk of sorts who had been preaching the coming of a new Kingdom. John “baptized” Jesus in the Jordan River, after which Jesus emerged to live out the reason why he was here in the first place.

Remember that this is the third chapter of a four part story, this portion being its own story about a thing called Redemption. What needed to be redeemed, of course, was a people to their God. Nothing had worked so far. People rightfully ask, if Jesus really is God, why did he come? Great question. Well, to redeem us is all. Oh, and to set in motion the entrance of the fourth and final chapter which will complete the Plan.

The first part of any redemptive act is to get the facts straight. Let’s not bury things under the rug or rationalize our way out of the predicament. We can’t set things right if we’re not willing or able to see them on the merits. This is what is supposed to happen in trials, with judges and juries seeking to analyze evidence in order to make things right. If they assume things that are not true, they will wander off and interpret things in ways inconsistent with reality. This was the plight of the Jews (and all of us, of course, but that’s getting ahead).

John, known as The Baptist (distinguished from one of the original twelve followers of Jesus with that same first name), said famously, “Repent! For the Kingdom of God is at hand!” The word, “repent,” as translated from the Greek translation of the Aramaic, basically means “Re-Think” or “Change Your Mind.” John is telling his hundreds or thousands of listeners that “You have it all wrong! Get ready to have your socks knocked off!”

To which, Jesus follows with the same retort and stays consistent with that theme for the rest of his life: “You have heard it said … but I tell you …” Both the Baptist and Jesus said the same thing over and over: “The Kingdom of God is at hand.” In other words, God is fully alive and in charge right here, right now. God is not sitting by doing his thing in a heavenly realm. He’s absolutely present and here’s what that means.

If to repent/rethink is the first step towards redemption, then the second step, according to Jesus was to “follow me.”

Let’s take a moment to see what is going on here because this is really important. It’s a giant clue into the nature of God’s entire plan.

To his early followers, they recognized something special about this rabbi, this teacher. And it was common for such scholarly men to gather followers who sought to learn and grow in his presence. In the accounts of his life, you’ll come across Jesus being referred to as Rabbi or Teacher on a regular basis. He was so accomplished, incredibly learned with a photographic memory of all of the Hebrew scriptures, coupled with a fascinating ability to unpack their meaning. But, his growing band of followers found it increasingly difficult to understand who this man really was and what was the significance of his teaching. In essence, their minds were being blown. This was no normal rabbi.

Instead, through countless ways, Jesus taught and modeled the character of God, he who was behind all of Creation and very much in evidence right now. Time after time, he said in various ways, “I am the deliverer.” “I am the Redeemer.” “I have come to set things to right.” He spoke to the arrogant and powerful religious leaders of the day and he spoke to the worst cast-offs in society, the wretched and the sinners. He feasted with both and said that his message was for everyone. He announced that redemption was possible for everyone if they just accepted this new reality. All sins could be forgiven and would be forgiven. In fact, he could do that. Just “follow me.” (In other words, surrender to God.)

Talk about blowing people’s minds! This was blasphemy to the religious leaders and tonic for the soul for the downtrodden and lost. To the religious leaders, this supposed rabbi was committing the capital offense of saying that he had the power and authority of God. Not even Moses said he could forgive sins, for goodness sake! And, well, you don’t get any higher in the pecking order than Moses. Jesus was a threat to the entire structure of things. The Judaic existence hung in the balance if people actually believed this rubbish. He had to die. He who claimed he arrived to usher in a new era and foster a whole new way of thinking needed to be killed.

There are four main accounts of the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, known to many as the Christ, directly translated as the “anointed one.” They are known as the four Gospels or books authored by early disciples Matthew and John and later followers Mark and Luke. The word “Gospel” means Good News. Anyone wanting to know what Jesus really was all about, what he said and did, should read one or all of these books carefully. They changed the world. So, what is the Good News?

Well, it’s both very complicated and very simple. Sometimes, we can get a very full understanding of the whole news story from a single piece of Jesus’ life or teaching. On the other hand, we can spend a lifetime unpacking the nature and characteristics of the Good News. In fact, as an aside, the former Jewish religious leader and persecutor of early Jesus followers (a man known as Saul of Tarsus, later “reborn” as Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles or non Jews), provides the bulk of what we call the New Testament (story of the new and rewritten contract or covenant between God and his people), which is an unpacking of who Jesus really is and what this Good News is all about. (Sorry for the run-on sentence.)

Again, so what is the Good News? Well, here are several early highlights.

1. God is here and present to each of us. We don’t need to go through anyone else to get to him. Just as Jesus was actually personally present to each of his followers, so is God to everyone.

2. It doesn’t matter what we have done or did not do. It doesn’t matter how good a life we’ve led or bad. By “following” Jesus, by surrendering to him, we are made whole. This is through a brand new concept called Grace. The Gospel shares the Good News that we cannot “earn” God’s love and favor. We already have it. No child needs to earn the love of a parent. It’s implicit in the relationship. So it is with us and God. Grace is God’s perfectly loving response to our surrender. It is a key element in the redemptive process.

3. Furthermore, God’s love for us is unconditional. We always had it and always will. No human being is “unloved” by God. God may detest particular human behaviors and there are always consequences but that does not affect his love for us. A parent employing the practice of “tough love” understands this at least a bit.

4. With Jesus, we will all exist for eternity in a physical reality in the presence of God … in a place reflective of the original created order, only magnified. More on that in Chapter 4.

There is another major piece of the Gospel (and Chapter 3) that we’ll consider now.

As the crowds following Jesus grew into the thousands and as stories of his miraculous powers spread everywhere, Jesus continued his teachings, constantly pointing people to the reality of God, who he is and what his plan for them entails. Finally, the religious leaders had had enough. As most of us know, after a final dinner (the Last Supper of fame) with his twelve main followers or disciples in a place in Jerusalem now know as the Upper Room, Jesus shocked them with the knowledge that he would be leaving them now. This was not new news but it must have been terrible to think that the time was here. He said to them as they ate the bread of the traditional annual Passover meal (it was Passover, of course, the traditional celebration of the Jews deliverance from slavery and now Jesus was telling him that this was the new Passover), Jesus said some version of “take this bread as (a symbol of) my body, broken for you.” Then he raised his glass of  traditional Passover wine and said some version of “drink this wine as (a symbol of) my blood (or life) shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.”

Shortly after, he was betrayed by one of the twelve, named Judas, who was probably really disappointed that it looked like this “messiah” Jesus was never really about leading a revolt against Rome, so turned him over to the religious leaders for a pocketful of cash. Jesus was put on trial in front of both the religious court and the Roman governor during the subsequent night and morning, tortured terribly throughout. Eventually, he was condemned to death for political reasons, as the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, found no fault in him but gave in to a mob that had now turned against Jesus. The fact is that Jesus always knew this was going to happen and now he had to endure what appeared to be his final act. So, he was flogged and beaten through the streets of Jerusalem, making his way, carrying the cross they would nail him to, to the hillside outside of town where crucifixions were commonly performed by the Romans. This last phase in the earthly life of Jesus is sometimes referred to as The Passion.

But, perhaps the most important element has yet to come in this third chapter of the grand story. And that is the second and third miracles, events that defy comprehension until we recognize that there is no alternative to their validity.

The second miracle occurred while Jesus hung on that cross, the true Messiah, Son of God, beaten, scorned, and forsaken by the very people he came to save. Discarded on the dung heap of humanity and history. A failed messiah, a naked and broken shell of a man, completely devoid of any kind of power and authority. Dust to dust. His message ultimately meaningless because, after all, it was grounded in the knowledge that he was God come to life and, of course, no all-powerful God would end life in such a manner. No chance.

But …

Everyone understands how cruel crucifixion is. It’s a tortuous and awful way to die. But, some people wonder why the especially big deal with Jesus. Why do Christians point out how awful this is in light of the many other equally or even more tortuous ways we kill one another (including faithful followers of Jesus who were later “martyred”)? Very good question.

The answer is that the true pain of Jesus’ death was not the physical pain of being nailed to that lumber, slowly suffocating as his body broke bit by bit. No. It was infinitely worse. Infinitely.

And it all comes back to the theme of this chapter. Redemption.

You see, the Man/God Jesus, the human being who knew what suffering was, came to correct the scales of justice, to make thing right between God and a completely fallen humanity. He did not just come to teach and model what the Kingdom of God is like and can be for each of us. He came to set things to right. And here is where it gets downright fantastic and incredibly hard to fathom.

Jesus, we know as the Son of God (another story altogether), voluntarily separated himself from the perfect God in his dying moments, a divorce of nearly infinite pain. With this act completed, he was truly broken, more than anyone before or since in history and, because of which, he cried out, “My God, why have you forsaken me?!” In essence he was in Hell, fully apart from God. This was a torture far greater than the mere physical reality of being crucified.

So, what gives? If this is true, what is this really about anyway? Why did he do this and what was he trying to accomplish?

The answer is that, in that moment, Jesus took on all of the Evil and sin of every person and all pieces in all of human history, of all reality both natural and supernatural. He took that on as a cloak or burden heavier than anything conceived at any time. It is commonly said that he “took on the sins of the world.” And, by dying, his sacrifice was the ultimate Atonement or setting things to right. Something had to be done to even the scales. Justice demanded it and justice is a permanent feature in God’s reality. Love demanded it and love is a permanent feature in God’s reality. Jesus once said that there is no love greater than that of a man laying down his life for a brother. Jesus is everyone’s brother while also being the one who is our Savior, the one who saved us from the consequences of our rejection of God. And, of course, Grace demanded it and Grace is a perfect expression of divine love and a permanent feature in God’s reality.

This act, for those who believe in its authenticity, is nothing short of miraculous and of cosmic significance. Billions of people are either supremely deluded or on to something of supreme import. It has to be one or the other. Many modern minds cry “Foul! What a crock!” To which many other modern minds respond with equal verve, “More true than anything you can know!” Talk about a difference of opinion that can get one’s juices flowing.

As the story goes, with his last earthly breath, succumbing to the ultimate burden, Jesus sighs, “It is finished,” and dies. Now, many people jump to the conclusion that what is finished is his life. Certainly, that is what those of his few followers and the soldiers standing beneath him must have thought. No one, not anyone, would have reason to think differently. But everything he lived and taught pointed to a different conclusion. The “it is finished,” is the gulf or separation between God and mankind. Evil played its best hand, battling tooth and nail to expel the Son of God from humanity’s reality. In the end, the sins of man overcame the loving presence of he who was without sin. The earthly perverted sense of justice had reduced love and grace to the trash bin.

Or not.

No, the story mentions that the sky turned dark and the earth shook. The most important immediate result is that the immense thick curtain in the Temple, separating where the people could be from the Holy of Holies, the large room where Jews believed God resided in some form, ripped in two. In other words, the veil between heaven and earth was rent and God was now available to all on a personal basis, just as Jesus demonstrated in his life. Jesus is the intermediary, the rip in the veil, come to save mankind.

There is only one more miracle left. The one that makes all of the others relevant. The one without which Jesus would never be remembered and his words just another set of moral teachings. It is the final miracle of Chapter 3.

His broken body taken down off the cross by distraught family and a few followers, this failed messiah was taken to a cavelike tomb where his corpse was rapidly clothed in linen and laid to rest. This was the end of crucifixion Friday, curiously known as Good Friday (for the reasons just mentioned) and Day 1. His followers, all being observant Jews, had to get this done before sundown, for the Sabbath rituals demanded it. The following day, Day 2, was the Sabbath (the Christian Sunday, so to speak) when work ceased. They must have been in a state of utter and complete despondency. Nothing made sense. They knew their lives were now at risk and expected full purges to follow (they did).

Until early on Day 3, several women went back to the tomb, the entrance of which had been guarded by elite Roman soldiers and blocked by an immense stone. They intended to seek permission to enter the tomb to wash the body and anoint it with preservative spices and oils as was the practice. There are various accounts of exactly what occurred but what is consistent is that there were no soldiers (the absence of which would have meant the death penalty for them) and the large stone requiring many strong men to remove, was rolled away. While the linens remained on the slab, Jesus was gone.

It is worth reading the various accounts of these moments and also comparing them to ancient prophesies. This had to be received as another horror by the women who undoubtedly believed a vicious desecration had occurred .. someone had stolen their Lord. However, in all accounts there is a young man (believed to be an angel) who tells them that “Jesus is risen.” In other words, he has defeated death and is alive.

The women race back to their small band (of men) and tell this news. Moments later, Jesus appears in the flesh and the rest is history.

So, the third major miracle in the Jesus’ time here on earth is called The Resurrection. The body brought back to life after having clearly died. Many people flirted with or believed that there could be some after life but no one conceived of a fully resurrected physical body like that demonstrated by Jesus on the third day.

What is the meaning of this third miracle? Well, it completes the act of Redemption. On the first day, Jesus defeated sin and evil, while on the third he defeated death. As the proclamation of the ancient Hebrew prophet said, “The wages of sin is death.” No longer. Through the life and death of Jesus, sin and death were vanquished and humankind now had a clear pathway to full redemption.

Fantastic? Of course. Impossible? Maybe. But, what if?

It is said by many Christian scholars that there can be no Christianity without acceptance of the fact of the Resurrection. Without the resurrection, we are left with another hollow religion, ultimately incomplete. Belief in the actual resurrection as well as its significance is the cornerstone upon which all reality is based. It is also a fundamental piece of God’s Grand Plan and his plan for each of us.

I have to say that I knew a whole lot about Christianity for many many years without giving much thought to the resurrection. I now firmly believe it happened. It has been proven to me beyond a reasonable doubt and I’m a critic at heart.

Jesus, the for-real Christ, is alive.