Well, we get going with the next installment about this course called Re-Intro.  We're now talking about what is critical to making a Christian able to live as a Christian and a complete human being in this world---a direct relationship with God through that Person of God known as the Holy Spirit.  Let me know what you think.


The New Birth: New Species of Man
In the previous chapter I gave you the opportunity to accept God's offer of eternal life by accepting Jesus of Nazareth--God the Son, as your personal Savior and Lord. (If you haven't done that and would like to at any time in this book, please refer back there--it's the heart of what the book is about.). At this point let me tell you about what happened. You were born again, in your spirit.

The best person to ever explain what that was all about was Jesus Himself. The account where He did is recorded in the Gospel of John, the third book of the New Testament, in its third chapter. The story goes as follows:

Nicodemus was a man that John called "a ruler of the Jews." In ancient history he was known as a leading member of the ruling Jewish religious-judicial body of that time, the Sanhedrin, governing with permission of the occupying Roman Empire. He was known as the Nasi of the Sanhedrin, which meant that he was the leading Jewish theologian of his time. Probably late in the first or early second year of Jesus’ ministry Nicodemus visited him at night. It is not certain why he visited Jesus in the middle of the night, but we do know that Jesus was already a source of immense controversy, and commanded a huge following, with major miracles a characteristic of His ministry. His teachings already had created a powerful effect on many, with many saying, "No man ever spoke as did this man." Jesus also had created many enemies among the Jewish leadership, and suspicion by the Roman tetrarch of Galilee, Herod Antipas. Antipas had already shown his antipathy toward those sympathetic to Jesus by imprisoning his cousin John the Baptist, who God had empowered to be Jesus' forerunner. But the opening statement he makes when he comes to Jesus’ tells us that he came, not only for himself, but for many others of the Jewish leadership, who, in spite of the official opposition of the Jewish priests and of Herod, clearly believed that Jesus was more than just a man.

Nicodemus said, "Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no man can do the works you do, unless God be with him." This admission is at complete odds of the bigoted and sick notion that all the Jews were clueless about Jesus’ greatness and that they all collaborated in His murder. The truth is, great numbers of Israelis, including many of the priests and what were called "teachers of the Law of Moses," had become convinced that Jesus was, at the very least, a great prophet of God, and possibly more. It just goes to show that anti-Semitism is not only wrong, it is based on the crassest of ignorance. Just one sidebar point; true Christianity is not, and can never be, anti-Jew, (or anti-anybody for that matter). Christianity is completely dependent, for its true historical origins and for an accurate understanding of it, upon Judaism. All but one of the writers of the Bible, including the New Testament, are Jews. The creation of the original Christian communities were virtually modeled after the Jewish synagogue system of worship. There are multiple statements in the New Testament of God’s continued high regard for the nation of Israel. The notion that anti-Semitism is part of true Christianity is a vicious and evil lie, which came from Satan himself. (And I’ll talk about Satan later, as if you didn’t know he was an evil pig!).

But back to Jesus and Nicodemus. His answer to Nicodemus’ statement of honest praise was totally unexpected, but the most basic truth He could say: "Truly I say to you, if a man is to enter the kingdom of God, he must be born again—from above." Nicodemus was floored—stunned. Historical documents of the writing of leading Jewish teachers and historians of that time state that many of Nicodemus' own school of rabbis, called the Pharisees, believed in a variant form of reincarnation, sort of like Hindus and Buddhists. There's no indication that he did, and he didn't think that Jesus did, so he asked, "How can a man be born when he is old? Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb to be born?" In the context of the religious arguments going on in his wing of Judaism, a question that has sounded silly to Western Christians doesn't sound crazy, but just a little perplexed.

But Jesus' didn't want to get into talking about arcane religious doctrine. As I shared with you in the earlier chapter about Jesus' proof of His being God, Jesus was into pragmatics, meeting people at the point of their need, not the point of what religionists thought they needed. Jesus didn't try to confuse Nicodemus with symbolic language, he came to the point and clarified himself by saying:


"I truly tell you the truth, no man can enter the kingdom of God unless he is [first] born of water and [then] of the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, 'You must be born again.' The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit…. No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven---the Son of Man…[So] the Son of Man must be lifted up that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God's one and only begotten Son….Light has come into the world… Everyone who does evil hates the light,…but whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God."

In the mind of Nicodemus, and people of that time, it was not hard to figure out. First Jesus states the obvious, first to be part of the kingdom of God, you have to be a human being, born through natural birth. Every woman who has ever uttered the words, "My water just broke!" knows EXACTLY what the term "born of water" is about. In a strange way, Jesus’ statement anticipates and deals with the issue of reincarnation. Why? Because he makes it clear, you don’t become part of God’s kingdom through endlessly passing through being different kinds of beings in multiple lifetimes to purify oneself. Only human beings need apply—you—and you can be born again, and made one with God, now!

Second, Jesus said that being born again is to be born from above, by God, through the Holy Spirit. Now what is that, and how is that? Well, Jesus answers that question by appealing to Nicodemus own knowledge as a religious teacher. You may have heard of the story of Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, and when the first two created human beings were deceived into disobeying the command of God not to eat forbidden fruit from a tree known as "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil." As a result of that act, every person inherited the nature of evil in their whole being, And here’s an important point—Jesus didn’t think that it was a fantasy tale. He treated the story of Adam and Eve as absolute historical fact—because it was. That is the significance of Christianity, there’s no dissecting one part as fantasy and another as fact. Jesus wouldn’t let us then and He won’t let us now. The Bible is either all true or the whole thing collapses. He was so convinced of the evil in men’s hearts, and its origin in the beginning of mankind’s existence, that He made that principle essential to understanding what the new birth is.

Jesus made it clear to Nicodemus that, because of the evil in men and women (The Bible calls it the "sinful nature."), they are spiritually "dead" before God, filled with sin and the fruit of his/her sinful deeds. That is something universal, the hate, the jealousy, the greed, the bitter rage and the desire to control others and use them for one’s own pleasure. We have all had the moments where we just feel that there is nothing we can do to stop ourselves from doing what we know to be wrong, or harmful to ourselves or those we profess to love. And Jesus knows that, and He knows how that sinful nature grips and permeates our minds, our emotions, and particularly our physical appetites that function within our bodies.

But Jesus then said that it was possible for that cycle of evil to be broken within us, beginning in our spirit, by being born again. He said that being born again, coming from God, is not something that is seen outwardly, like the wind. Someone who is reborn, who allows that experience to take its full course, has effects on his life that become visible in time, some sooner than others. But Jesus said that being reborn is something that happens in a man or woman’s spirit.

And Jesus then said that the new birth would only be made possible by His death, later to happen on the cross. He had to be "lifted up" so that all who believe in him would have eternal life. And to make sure there was no misunderstanding, Jesus emphatically said that His, and His Father’s motivation was all-consuming love, for every single man, woman, and child, on the whole earth, past, present and future.

How to explain that kind of change? It’s sort of like what happens to a tree and its root system. You see a tree almost dead by drought, give it plenty of water and care, but still see very little change at all. But the truth is that the change is immediate and dramatic, down where it counts, in the root system, the source of that tree’s health and nutrition. That’s what happens when you and I are born again, it’s in your spirit, not your mind, emotions, or your body. That’s why there are so many Christians who appear to be completely unlike what the Bible says they should live like. The change never goes beyond the initial experience. But the potential is there, to see a dramatic change from the spirit, to the mind and even the body.

Returning to the analogy to the Holy Spirit as a microchip acting as operating RAM is appropriate now. Because when a man/woman/child of accountable age chooses to become a Christian, the Holy Spirit comes in, like that computer chip, recreates the human spirit, and equips it with the potential to be like God, it is the operational ability to have the relationship with God of father-child, older-to-younger brother-sister, friend-to-friend. And when the individual who is born again cultivates that relationship, like proper maintenance of the computer system, the ramifications of that act of being born again-born from above are massive—to your emotional health, your work, your relationships, your character, even to your physical health and fitness. That microchip—access to the relationship with God, makes you truly human, and makes you able to withstand the most horrible things that can happen to you and those you love.

Oh, and yeah, the Holy Spirit can teach you everything you need to know about love, and help you to live a life of completeness in that area of life. And in this age of callousness and cynicism, which is born out of the wounding of people’s hearts and souls, that is good news.

So as I said before, congratulations, you took the red pill. The chip is planted in you. You have the potential to be human the way God wanted you to be. The next trick is to energize that chip throughout you. And there are three events that the Bible says should occur at the beginning of a new Christian’s life: baptism in water, baptism in the Holy Spirit, and in what the Bible calls the Lord’s Supper. All of them have been, and are still today horribly misunderstood and misused in the Christian church. But properly understood and embraced, and the sky’s the limit!

I’ll begin with the one most misunderstood, the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

 
THE BAPTISM OF THE HOLY SPIRIT: FREEDOM FOR THE MIND.

Usually when people think of giving over one's mind to another person it means one thing--loss of control, loss of independence, even slavery. And you know, it is true, giving up control of our ability to express ourselves strike at the heart of what we are as human beings. I get really upset about some things, and near the top of them is a so-called Christian doctrine that has been believed by tens of millions over the last 500 years that has to go down as the worst one of all. It is called predestination and election. I'll talk about it later, but the big problem with it is that it masks an actual Biblical teaching by the same name, and turns it into a really disgusting concept: that you have no free will to make decisions at all, and that God picked who will go to heaven and who goes to hell before the beginning of time. It makes me want to puke! This doctrine makes God out to be a Nazi, or worse, the Devil himself! Everybody is just a puppet in the hands of one wackoed-out deity. And it doesn't match anything else about the personality of God you read about in the Bible.

Beyond that set of mis-teachings, the truth is that we run into people who want to control us every day, for all sorts of reasons. From the array of weird religious cults that seek to dominate their followers' every daily activity, to different governments and social systems that have sought that kind of dominance, to large corporate business systems who use their wealth, access to highly sophisticated marketing, and ability to sway even democratic governments to make competition in a free marketplace, whether of products or ideas, almost inaccessible. We can all, if we concentrate, relate instances where we felt that our ability to choose, our ability to even think, was stolen from us. Worse yet, some of us can recall our own families to be places where honest emotion, honest desires, opinions, even love, could not be expressed. Some reading this book now are in the midst of abusive relationships: mental, physical, even sexual, that have turned their ability to think and make choices for themselves utterly impossible.

And in every single one of them, the attempt to control and dominate one's ability to think for himself/herself is wrong--dead wrong! Even children, whose parents have the responsibility to teach, train, and discipline behavior in their preparation for adulthood, have the equal responsibility to train those same children to think for themselves--choose for themselves--express themselves! And has that ever been mishandled! The most essential principle of every human being--what makes him/her human--is freedom! No one has the right to control my thoughts, my ability to choose, within a framework of respect for the right of others to have that same life. That's what is known as law and order--what former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black called "ordered liberty."

So then, when anyone starts talking about giving up control of one's life, one's very mind, their very ability to speak with their own mouth, to the will of another, to God, that same reaction of fear, doubt, mistrust, even rebellion is not unreasonable, but quite understandable. Unlike what many in religious institutions would think, God is not personally offended about it by that desire for independence, but He is offended when someone acts on that rebellion and unbelief, not when the individual simply expresses a need to have that fear resolved. God is perfect but He is not petty!

But make no mistake, God is the only One in the Universe that has the right to control over your mind and individuality. After all, He made you. But understand one thing, God's idea of control is not the same as yours. And His way of changing and harnessing you as a person is totally different from that of anyone else. He is able to both control you and free you--at the same time. How is that? Through the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. Let's talk about what I mean.

Grand Paradox: Freedom through Surrender

The Baptism of the Holy Spirit is very simple, it is the convergence of God's Spirit upon the human mind. When an person becomes a Christian, he is born again in his spirit, which is the real "you." As I told you before, you are a spirit, you have a mind, or soul, and you live in your body. Having Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, live in you, is what makes you a Christian. But we're now talking about something else; in this case, something that affects the part of you that your spirit possesses, your soul, which is made up of your mind, will, and emotions. How can the Holy Spirit both live in your spirit, and come from outside of you to merge into your soul, at the same time? Simple, He's God, He can because He's everywhere, and He can do anything He wants, if it fits with His own character.

So what's the purpose of this convergence of the Spirit with your soul? To give you one thing that we in this age can use a lot more of--- POWER! We need the ability to overcome a lot of stuff---starting with our own personality, but going to a lot of things we just don't seem to be able to overcome. Things like failure, broken relationships, poverty, sickness and disease, even deep emotional disorders and psychosis, or the sense of total inability to express the truth of what Jesus has done for us and how He can do the same for others--to people with no sense of spiritually; all are things that need a lot more than a set of religious teachings to repair and restore a person's life to wholeness.

Some may ask, well is dealing with all of that important to God? Absolutely, it's the bottom line of what God wants from you in this world. As I've told you before, it is God's desire to be personally involved with all areas of our lives.

The best way to describe what is happening is, first of all, to take what the Bible says about it, or to be exact, what Jesus said about the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. When He was in his second or third year of ministry on earth, He once made a speech when He was in Jerusalem, Israel, which was then, and is now, the spiritual heart of Judaism. He wanted to make the point that when anyone put their faith in Him, that a powerful change would come in his/her life. His devoted disciple, the Apostle John, recorded it in the seventh chapter of his Gospel: " When any man believes in me, as the Scriptures have said, out of his innermost being shall flow rivers of living water. By this He meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified."

Here Jesus was speaking of the time that He was going to give everyone who believed in Him the Holy Spirit. And the image He wanted to create in the minds of everyone who would hear Him, and read the account of what He said in the Bible, was of a rushing, exploding, massive river, at flood stage, far overflowing its banks. He wanted to create an image of power, and one of water, which is the basic component of life on earth. He wanted--and wants all of us to know that the Holy Spirit, when He comes into you, can create an effect that is powerful and life-giving. And in both instances, that involves change, awesome change---in your own personal character, in your relationships, in your health, and in the environment around you. You cease to be defined by the circumstances of your life prior to this experience, you become someone who is capable of undoing everyone's preconceived ideas about who you are. You become what Karl Marx called "the new man." Only this new man is not created by force of arms or bloodshed or terror, but by the most awesome power of love imaginable.

This gift of the Holy Spirit comes in two separate stages, as recorded in the Bible. The first comes when you take "the red pill," when you accept Jesus to be your Savior and Lord. The Spirit comes into your spirit, makes you a new person, and you are reconstituted as a new person--you are born again. We talked about that earlier, and that is an essential component of this microchip of God. There is an element of that microchip that is made effective through an interaction of the Spirit in you and the serious reading and study of the Bible--Christians have long called it the indwelling of the Spirit.

But the factor that makes God's microchip in you operational to give you power is a second, and separate experience, one that happens after you become a Christian. That is the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. And Jesus wants to give that to every person, everywhere. He spoke of it in that speech in John with the imagery of power, and then told His closest followers after His resurrection that they needed to receive it, and then made sure that all of us understood how to receive it, by having the first accounts of people receiving "the Baptism," as it is referred to by many Christians, recorded in the New Testament book of Acts.

After His resurrection, Jesus spent about forty days conversing with his disciples, to as many as 500 at one time. He made sure that all the significant followers of his in Israel at the time were made aware that He was raised from the dead, and retaught his teachings to them, this time in the light of the Resurrection, and the complete shattering of misconceptions and preconceived ideas that they all had about Him prior to His death and rising. Then the time came that He needed to ascend back into heaven, to be back at the "right hand" position of authority next to His Father-God, a position of total authority over the universe. He knew that these followers of His would be His representatives, His tools of His work in the earth. So He left them these instructions, as recorded by the physician Luke, in the first chapter of Acts:  
   
   
  
Hope you learned a few things that will answer some questions you may have had.  Let me know what you thought of it.  Thanks.  Bye for now.

Hi.  How are you today, amigos-friends?  I am sitting here at my computer, trying to work at the forty different things that demand my attention at once, but knowing that I don't have any real reason to complain.  There are people who wish they had my life, with the comparative peace necessary to spend hours per day on the Internet, working and both making a living and talking about making a life--a spiritual one.  Here's the next portion of Re-Intro.  At this point, the beginning of what I term Chapter 6 of what will be a full book, I move into what I haven't done before.  Beginning later this week, I have to start writing again.  I'm not looking forward to it, but again, I'm not complaining.  I hope to express my thoughts with sufficient coherence.  Today, though, I'll be sharing what it takes to become a Christian, and the beginning of understanding what it takes to live as a true Christian, the way the Bible defines him/her.  And that ability, that power to live such a life divergent from the life of all other people is built on one Person, the Third Person of God (what we Christians call the Trinity), that Person being The Holy Spirit.  He's likened to a lot of things, but I think, since I spend so much time at this console, that He is most like a microchip, a living microchip, which transforms our being--our minds, souls, hearts, emotions, our very bodies, into something special, something that makes our humanity most complete.  I'll let the book do the talking now, but tell me what you think.  Adios and God bless for now.
 
 

CHAPTER SIX: ON BECOMING A CHRISTIAN, AND WHAT COMES AFTER.

In the famous movie, The Matrix, there is the scene where Laurence Fishburne gives Keanu Reeves the choice between the red pill and the blue pill. He takes the blue pill, and he goes back to his old life, where he lives blissfully unaware that he is a preprogrammed slave of a select small group of high-tech monster masters. He takes the red pill, and he is set free to fight these oppressors, as a truly human individual.

Luke 13:3, and Romans 10:9-10 tells us all that a person needs to do to become a Christian, which are three things: repent, believe, and confess—state publicly that the individual believes in his heart, asking Jesus to come and live in his heart.

Repentance is not merely regretting what you did which is wrong (the Bible calls it ‘sin’), it is deciding that sin would no longer be your primary practice or passion. It is a "turning around," as said in the Bible’s original word for repentance.

Believing is not mere mental assent, with no sense of commitment or involvement in the ramification of such a realization that Jesus is Lord and God. Believing in the commitment of one’s heart and soul that Jesus is God, and therefore entitled to your whole life. When you do that, an amazing thing happens to you---God, in the person we Christians call The Holy Spirit, comes into your heart--your spirit---the real you, and you become a new human being. We'll talk about him in a short time, but trust me for now, we're talking about God coming to be your God, your master, yes, but also your friend, your brother, your father, your teacher--all at once, completing you, giving you the potential for becoming a person far more fulfilled than you could ever be alone, or in any other philosophy, religion, or any other way of life.

Confessing Jesus is Lord is done before witnesses, because everyone who Jesus called to follow Him as His disciples He called publicly.

A standard confession—asking Jesus to become your God and Lord, goes like this:
Jesus, I am a sinner. I have broken your laws, more times than I can count, and I know that I deserve eternal punishment—in hell. I don’t know how I can ever change. But I want to. And I now know that You love me, and that You never have wanted me to go anywhere except heaven. I now know that You died on the cross, and rose from the dead, because you wanted to take my punishment on yourself. I reject all sin, and every place where Satan has controlled me. I reject all other gods as false. I ask You to come into my heart, and make me a new man (woman). Holy Spirit, who I now know is God, too, come into my spirit now, and make me brand new. Thank you, right now, for coming into me, and forgiving my sins. Thank you for making me a Christian. I ask you, Father God, to fill me with your power, from the Holy Spirit, so I can do what you want me to do. Thank you. In Jesus’ Name I pray, Amen.

If you just prayed this prayer, and meant it, deep inside your heart, then congratulations!
You just became a Christian. That’s it. Nothing mysterious or elaborate or religious about it. You ask Jesus to live in you, through the Holy Spirit, and He does.

You just took the red pill, you just woke up. You just stepped into a great new world.
Now the changes begin. If you’ll cooperate with God, you are about to become the most human a person you can imagine, with new opportunities beyond your imagination.

We’ll talk about what’s next in the next section.
 

OKAY, NOW I'M ONE OF THESE CHRISTIANS, WHAT NOW?
(OR, "O MY GOD, WHAT HAVE I GOTTEN MYSELF INTO NOW?")

When you've been a Christian as long as I have, you get used to the kinds of things that other Christians, both leaders and regular members (usually called "laymen," which is not found anywhere in the Bible, but more on that later). Usually when people come to faith in Jesus as God, they are immediately hit with all sorts of solicited and unsolicited advice about what to do to make themselves the kind of people who are acceptable to the people in the churches.
All of them have the following usual requirements: 1) Get a Bible and start reading it, usually the Gospel of John; 2) Pray, with all sorts of different techniques offered, usually sounding strange and bizarre; 3) Go to church where the Bible is accurately taught, at least in the view of the one giving the advice; 4) Get baptized in water, through any one of several methods; 5) Tithe--give a tenth of your money to Christian work, usually the local church the new Christian is coaxed into attending (a lot of ministers sadly will quote this requirement first); 6) Get baptized in the Holy Spirit; 7) Don’t get baptized in the Holy Spirit, and stay away from those who want you to get baptized in the Holy Spirit; 8) "Fellowship" with other Christians (find new friends who share your new faith and will support you, but only as long as you line up your life with their notions of what they think a Christian should be like), in other words, become just like them; 9) Start giving up all your bad habits (usually all the things you like to do the most); and some would even say 10) Get registered to vote--support the political candidates your church leaders tell you to support.

There was a survey taken about 15 years ago, of people who had converted to the Christian faith during adulthood, whether it was someone who came to faith as an 18-year old college freshman or someone in their 80s. I recall that the sad result of the survey was that the average Christian convert will remain as an active practitioner of the faith in a typical church for about 5 years. Other surveys I've heard of cite figures of less time than that. But, why are they leaving so soon?
 
Well, after a lifetime of reading, observing, and experiencing, I found that the reasons for people leaving are a whole lot like the results of that survey. They reported that people leave pretty well for the reasons most non-Christian adults and teenagers who have any experience with Christianity don't bother trying out the faith in the first place. They find that it was dull, boring, irrelevant to their lives, and they didn't find the Christianity they were taught and experienced to be reasonable--in other words, they didn't think it was true or workable anymore. These dropout Christians were also deeply disillusioned by the kind of actions demonstrated by the people in their churches--especially the leadership.

What I found that was more important, though, was what was it that motivated those that stayed. What happened that made these Christians so deeply satisfied with their faith? And there are a lot of them, after all, the number of Christians around the world are growing, and fast, as we talked about in chapter two. Christianity, especially in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, is mushrooming, with hundreds of millions of new converts, especially in lands where the faith has not been traditionally strong, and is now even enduring horrific persecution. And even in the heartland of America, a new resurgence of Christianity is quietly occurring, which is creating powerful new countercurrents to the secularism that has characterized the country over the past century. Indeed, the present President makes no secret of the importance of his evangelical Christian faith in his own life, and the large majority of members of one of America's two major political parties are openly declaring that Christianity is the foundation of the kind of nation they want, which is bad or good, depending on your point of view.

But why are so many coming to faith, and staying? And how is that important to you, if you have just become a Christian? Well, it means everything, of course. This is either a journey you'll quickly renounce or the adventure of a lifetime. There are many reasons that Christians remain with their churches of choice; family tradition, cultural, racial, or national identity, familiar relationships, enjoyable worship experience or involvement in meaningful church programs. But there are likewise many other people who have similar experiences who still leave after a relatively short time, to the puzzlement of all those around them. And members of other religions will cite similar reasons to remain in their institutions or spiritual faiths. So what's the difference?

What I have found is that those who stay, stay because of Him--Jesus! They have, in case after case, found that the relationship with Jesus as God is lasting, and can sustain them through the most horrible situations in life, or give them perspective, balance, and humility when life goes well. They find that the relationship is all-encompassing, that it is the relationship, not the institution, that matters. Churches, religious leaders, and institutions, traditions and different doctrines come and go. Jesus is forever! That sense of relationship is found in all of the 35,000 plus denominations and church movements of Christianity, in all of its major divisions: Catholic, Orthodox, traditional Protestant, Charismatic-Pentecostal, Messianic Jewish, both churches originating from traditional Western denominations and those arising from indigenous church movements begun in the Third World. In all of them, the Christians who make the greatest impact, whether as notable leaders or as that special aunt, uncle or friend that many of us point to as a role model and say, "That's a real Christian!" have, as their one common principle their deep and abiding love and devotion for Jesus.

The sad truth, I found, in both my life, and in the lives of Christians and their churches everywhere, is that the churches, and especially their leaders, are incredibly dismal--just plain bad in developing that sense of relationship in the mass of Christians. Many times Christian leaders, whether we call them pastors, priests, bishops, elders, or ministers, simply engage in intellectual exercises on what works to do to please God. That makes religion little more than one's duty to their chosen institution. And that can't sustain you in the day where your life is falling apart.

What got me through when I was once so disillusioned, for several years, that I wanted to quit Christianity was the relationship. I kept coming back to the fact that Jesus is God, his grave is empty, the proof that everything the Bible says about Him is true, and the fact that He loves me and accepts me as I am, period.

So I stayed with my faith, but was still bitter about the church. I hated their dopey doctrines, which was no more than "the Bible plus all their junk." I hated their uninspiring worship, their insincerity, their irrelevant teaching, their manipulation of believers, their exploitation of their desire for service to accomplish the leaders' corporate empire-building, the church's incessant ability to interfere in people's private lifestyle when they shouldn't, and it's unwillingness to be involved when they should.

Eventually, I realized that bitterness, which the Bible says is a sin, did nothing for either me, or for my fellow Christians, whom the Bible tells me to love, if I truly love Jesus. He said it the night before His crucifixion, "A new commandment I give you. Love one another, as I have loved you. All men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love one for another." None are perfect, that's why Jesus died on the cross. It is such a basic truth, but one that is so frequently and regularly disobeyed. So I decided, and am still deciding, to do something far more constructive. People I can forgive, and do. Institutions and long-standing practices and doctrines, invented by fallible men that have harmed the cause of Jesus and abused people I will never tolerate or forgive.

"So what are you doing," you may ask, "trying to start a new church?" Well, yes and no. No, I don't want to start the latest installment of yet another organization of churches. We have about 35,000 too many. All of them have their element of biblical and rational reasons for existing, and their doctrines usually have, more or less, some elements of biblical truth. But the truth is, all of them also have their flaws, some more than others. But all of them have made the one mistake that has been Christianity's failing. They--yes, we, have been way too centralized, focused on our leaders, and what they think and say that the Bible says or what Christians should believe, and how they should live.

In a sense, I do want to help create a new church.  A church within the Church, where the people recognize that, far more than ever before, that what is important, once again, is the relationship. And that's what I'm trying to convey in the rest of this book. Christianity is not such a mystery that you can't figure it out, with the help of God the Holy Spirit. And the place to begin is with what, or I should say who makes you a Christian in the first place, and that is the Holy Spirit.
 
THE HOLY SPIRIT: THE MICROCHIP OF GOD

When you buy a computer, you have lots of components to it. Hard drives, motherboards, video and audio cards, CPU, and of course the outer hardware, the frame, the keyboard, the monitor. But there is one item that is essential to the running to the entire system, that makes the entire project workable and without which the whole system goes dead, the microprocessor--the chip often no greater than the top half of your thumb. It is the very essence of the computer---especially its access to the Internet. Most of all, it gives the computer its power, its personality, and its character.

When a man/woman becomes a Christian, as you may have done earlier, something very similar to a computer receiving its microchip, its operating RAM, occurs. It's like a little piece of God, the real God, comes into your spirit---the real you. And something truly miraculous happens--you're a whole reborn person.

Now I want you to know that there is nothing in all of the universe that can legitimately describe the nature of God, and I would not presume that I can claim that ability. But there is something very real about how an infinite, eternal God, who is higher than the heavens, can personally live inside a human being, and how the analogy of the microchip to the computer can explain that living relationship of God to man.

But, before I get really confusing, the best way to describe what happens--or happened to you, is to start by talking you about what we call the Trinity, about God himself. Why, because you can't understand what we mean by the Holy Spirit unless we clarify what we mean about God as Three-in-One. You'll just be thinking that he's just some kind of impersonal ghastly spiritual being having something to do with God but kind of weird otherwise. In fact, the most common mistake about the Holy Spirit is that people think of Him as an "it", a thing. He's not, He's God. So let me explain how God fits it together.
 
 
The Trinity:

One of the most hotly debated, most misunderstood things about Christianity is the idea about the Trinity, or what the Bible calls the Deity or the Godhead. In fact, it is the definition of who God is. But that is what confuses people who are not Christians, and a lot of people who are. Muslims will often, because of their fierce loyalty to the principle of the one God, accuse Christians of having three gods, and therefore being disloyal to God. But, as I have told my Muslim friends, "Never tell a Christian that he is a polytheist, that he worships three gods. He will become furious with you." It is well-known that Christians, Jews, and Muslims agree on one thing above all, that there is only one true God, and that God is the God described in the Bible, which the Jews call the Tanakh, and which the Muslims call the Injil.

Christians have a misunderstanding with Muslims over their use of the name "Allah" to refer to God, as if they were referring to another god, which in turn makes the Muslims angrier for being insulted by the Christians. "Allah", in all the nations, languages, and cultures influenced by Islam means, literally, "the only God," and that it is the God described in the Bible. But all three major religions from the Middle East have in common that one principle, as expressed in the Sh'ma Yisrael of the Jews: "Hear O Israel, the LORD our GOD, the LORD is One!"

But what is important to know is that this infinite, eternal single God has three different Persons. They are, the Father, the Son, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. They are all one God, yet they are three. In the Bible, the account of the creation of the world is recorded, as most people in the West know, in its first book, called Genesis. Christians, most Jews, and Muslims alike revere that portion of the Bible as absolutely from God. Yet God, in that creation account and many places thereafter, is called by the Hebrew name Elohim, which literally means, "the one God who is three." At the moment that the first man was created, God said, "Let us make man in our image…" And again, that same word, Elohim, was used then. From the very beginning of the Bible, the principle of 3/1 for God's identity and essential nature was made clear to the world.

Trinity was a Latin title that was taken by the Christian church and applied to describe the Godhead beginning in the third century. There have been numerous attempts to describe the Trinity with analogies from nature; water as liquid-ice-steam is a common one. The analogy I have liked most was made by Patrick of Ireland, the great Christian leader I talked about in Chapter 3. He used the shamrock, the common clover grass of Ireland, with three leaves in the same blade, to illustrate the Godhead. It is clearly one blade of grass, but with three clearly identifiable leaves.

God is one, but three different manifested Persons, each with a specific identity, status, and authority. God the Father is the chief authority over the universe and over heaven itself, his home and that of all who honor Him. God the Son-Jesus, is what some call the manifest member of the Godhead, which is a nice theological way of saying He is the one that physically shows up whenever God wants to show himself to humanity. He is also the one who had to become man, to identify with us, and to die for our sins on the cross.

But it is God the Holy Spirit that brings God to earth in His power, His willingness to come to the aid of men and women, and in His desire to teach us how to live, and empower us both to live according to His teachings and overcome the difficulties of our lives, even through the working of miracles! It is God the Holy Spirit who inspired and guided the 40 different writers of the Bible to create their collaborative masterpiece, into a work that is truly His work. Most of all, the Spirit brings the power of God to bring about the greatest wonder of all---the spiritual rebirth of a human being, not in a form of a different person, as in reincarnation, but of you as the real you! And that is where the idea of the Holy Spirit as a living, personal microchip makes sense. He is inserted into your spirit, connected to your mind at the moment you become a Christian, and he makes you clean from sin, and a completely new species of human being.

And He is able to do that with all of the hundreds of millions, a billion or more of the 2.3 billion who claim a Christian faith, all at the same time! How? Because He's God, dude! Why would I say that not everybody who claims to be a Christian is one? Because the only person who completely knows the human heart is God! And the Bible says, as I said earlier in this chapter, you become a Christian by your own choice, from your heart. God has no grandchildren! You don't get it from where you live, or what family you have, or your race, your culture, your country, not even if you are part of a certain church or religious organization or denomination! On the issue of becoming a Christian, those things mean NOTHING! Nada, zip, zilch, cero! It is your choice to accept His offer to forgive your sins---directly---to you, that matters!

To understand what the importance of the Holy Spirit in you truly is, as the microchip of God in your spirit, and before we begin talking about how to live in the kind of power He promises, I'll share what the Bible talks about when the Holy Spirit makes you born again. And to start, I'll share with you about what you are---as God sees you.
 

Body, Soul, Spirit: It's You, Baby!

The truth of the Trinity's existence is illustrated in another really cool way, you are a Trinity, too! According to the Bible, there is three-part split to your personhood as an individual. In God's mind, you are in His image, and His likeness. You are, like Him, a spirit, you have a mind, and you live in a body. Notice I did not say you have a body, a mind, and a spirit. The Apostle Paul describes that makeup of the individual best in one of the Letters he wrote, while under God's power, to Christians in one of the cities where he taught about Jesus and began the Christian church in Europe; "May the Holy Spirit purify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul, and body be made pure for the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ." (His coming refers to the end of the world, but we'll talk about that later).
 
 You are, in your essence, a spiritual being, not a physical one. That's why the desire for significance is so important to you--because, from the moment of conception, you were a living spiritual being, just like God, with creativity and self-awareness. It is what separates us from all other life forms on earth.

Your spirit is what the Bible also calls "your heart." It is the point where your deepest emotions, your most subconscious mind, the depths of your will, connect with the spiritual dimension of the universe. From that place, which the Bible calls "the wellspring of life," you connect with what is in your soul--which is made up of your emotions, your will, and your intellectual mind.
It is critical to every person to understand that the center of your world is not in your body, that most of us obsess over, but our spirit.

And because you are a spiritual being, wanting to be in union with God, you have the right to claim ownership over your intellect-emotions-will, as well as over your body. That ownership, like physical property like land, is subject to what we call ultimate sovereign domain, with God as the sovereign grand poohbah of all existence, of course.

God has the ultimate right to call the shots of ownership over you, after all, He made you. But like in a democracy where people's liberties are limited to the rule of law, yet that same law protects those God-given rights (yes, more on that later), God owns you, yet He has given us His laws-His Word, the Bible, which also guards and guarantees your own human rights and dignity among your fellow men and women.

Remember, as we discussed in chapter six about the reasons that God sent Jesus and raised him from the dead, and gave us all the logical and scientific and historical evidence for the truth of the Christian faith, He did it for one reason---He loves you! And someone who has a true healthy love for someone will pursue the best for the loved one, what will build up his/her dignity and self-respect. So in that sense it is not a contradiction between God's rule and your liberty, one is impossible without the other. It is impossible to be free without God's rule, because, unfortunately, there is another spiritual being in the universe, his name is Lucifer---and he hates you, and wants to make you his slave. It is by submitting yourself to God that He can guarantee your freedom and success.

The way that God empowers you as an individual, with rights and liberties, as well as responsibilities and duties, is through Himself, coming to live in you. And the way He does is in the Person of the Holy Spirit. That is what we Christians mean by something you may have heard of before, being "born again." It is the point that the Holy Spirit comes to live in you. Let's talk about that for a minute.

Hi, it's me again today.  It's been a few days, but hopefully I'm getting into more consistency in communicating with you.  I hope to get to every day after a while.  I hope that when, you guys are accessing this (when I've gotten around to circulating this blog's link to everybody---no telling when you actually read this.  You will have to move down several entries to get the whole feel of what Re-Intro is about.), you'll appreciate how each entry comes together into one whole.  Today it's about the proof of the Resurrection of Jesus through the Shroud of Turin.  Read and enjoy, and ask questions.  That's what this is for.  Adios for now.
 

The Shroud of Turin---Much Maligned---The Smoking Gun.

In a large church in Turin, Italy’s third largest city, lies the burial shroud, the cloth that bears that city’s name. Emblazoned is a perfect photographic negative, on a 2,000-year-old cloth created from fabric from plants that existed only in Palestine, in the area around Jerusalem, Israel, and only during that time. Those plants went extinct within a few decades of the time that Jesus died, about 32 A.D. The presence of residue of thorns from a flower that were known to have existed in Palestine, both then and today, and expert criminologists have confirmed that the shroud was definitely made about 30 A.D. in the area of Jerusalem.

Most of all is the image, a perfect photographic negative, which has been dated as having occurred about 30 A.D. Modern photography was invented by Matthew Brady in the United States, during the American Civil War. The only way that the image could have been so completely and accurately imposed upon the shroud was through a powerful and instant infusion of energy, not from the outside, but from the inside, from within the body of the man it enfolded. It is the image of a man unmistakably tormented, tortured, flogged, and pierced with large, sharp objects---in his forehead with thorn-like incisions, in his wrists, his feet, and in his right side, just above the rib. What is even more incredible is that the image is a perfect 3-dimensional reproduction, you can see it on the other side of the shroud. You didn't get that until the digital age! Something is certainly supernatural here.

Many have gone to incredible lengths to discredit the authenticity of this shroud, but they have failed to do so. Some have claimed that the 3-D image could be easily replicated in a iron oxide brass rubbing over a bas relief of the original figure. I know myself about brass rubbings. I have one that I made of an image and inscription at a church in Stratford-on-Avon, England, William Shakespeare's hometown. You can, over a suitable sheet, usually of art paper, usually black, rub out an image…on one side of the sheet, the one to the naked eye on the frontal side. But nothing is created on the dorsal or back side in brass rubbings. and that IS on the Shroud. And what's more, that notion was discredited years ago, by two U.S. Air Force scientists, John Jackson and Eric Jumper, in tests run in 1975. Jackson and Jumper used a sophisticated image enhancement analyzer designed for the NASA space program, and discovered that the Shroud image contained encoded 3-D data not found in ordinary reflected light photographs. Most importantly, the image data showed that the cloth was enfolded around a real human body at the time the image was formed. Even scientists who do not believe that the Shroud is the genuine image of Jesus have rejected the brass rubbing-bas relief argument.

The closest that anyone came to such a debunking of the claim of the Shroud came from a group of scientists who did carbon-14 dating experiments on the Shroud in 1988. The group, dominated by scientists from England, chosen by a new Cardinal, or chief priest of the church in Turin which has guarded the Shroud since 1578, was a group that made no pretense of their contempt for the notion of the Shroud's authenticity. Ironically, the new Cardinal himself was a skeptic. Still that was not dispositive of the issue of the Shroud. The group concluded at the end of their testing, which was done exclusively with carbon-14 dating, that the Shroud was a fake, a relic that was created in Europe in the 13th century, and that the image was made of an vermilion-based paint.

Well, that should have been the end of the matter. There have been lots of items--relics, objects of veneration and worship that claimed to be images or property of revered religious figures, which turned out to be fakes. No problem, we accept it, and move on. The issue of Jesus of Nazareth does not rise or fall on the validity of one image on a burial shroud. But the truth is that scientists, if they want to deny truth that makes them uncomfortable, will do like other people encountering the same problem, they change the rules to get the result they want. And that's what we have with the 1988 group, the problems with the Carbon-14 group was immediate, and showed their dishonesty, and that's why the majority of the scientific community concerned with the issue of the Shroud's authenticity doubts its findings.

First, the findings of another group of scientists, called the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP), begun in 1978, and whose findings were published in 1981, were completely uncontested by the 1988 group. The STURP group of experiments, conducted by 40 scientists in multiple disciplines, still have stood up to this day. It is important to examine the findings of the STURP group, what they and scientific researchers found was extraordinary, and we'll do that in a couple of paragraphs.

Second, the whole test program, or protocol, was violated by the scientists in 1988.  Yes, they broke their own rules! First, there were supposed to be three pieces taken from the Shroud for testing, from different points of the Shroud. Instead only one was taken, cut from the outside edge of the Shroud, exactly where C-14 experts say to avoid due to possibilities of excess contamination. Then, there was probable additional contamination of the sample by the researchers themselves. They also failed to take proper accounting of additional carbon enrichment due to a fire at the church in 1532 in which the Shroud was narrowly rescued from being destroyed--additional carbon deposits from a fire can and do artificially mislead carbon-14 testing into giving a reading many hundreds of years off of an object's actual age.

Third, the Shroud, based upon the flawed outside piece, was carbon-dated as about 800 years old, during the medieval period of European history. A huge dilemma of contradiction exists between the finding by the 1988 researchers and the historical knowledge required for an artist to create a perfect 3-D forgery. The medical, artistic, and historical knowledge of crucifixion practices necessary to create the Shroud image as it was in its final form was completely unknown in the Middle Ages! The 1988 group's conclusion is contradicted by documentation that supports the position of a Middle East origin for the Shroud, including a Roman coin, perfectly imprinted over the eyes of the man shown in the image, which was only minted between 29 and 33 A.D.

In particular among the historical findings that discredit the C-14 estimate of medieval origin, was one fact that is astounding to me. The Shroud has been in the possession of Roman Catholics and Roman Catholic churches and organizations for probably about 800 years. The medieval teaching of the Catholic church about the crucifixion of Jesus was that the nails in His hands were driven through the palms of his hands. But the historical fact was that the Romans never did that, they knew that the hands, with the nail there, would tear completely off the nail while on the cross, making the punishment far more excruciating at that moment but still ineffective for the time of the execution. The Romans drove the nails through the wrists, which in ancient times was considered part of the hand! All the people of medieval Europe had no idea that was the case. Yet the Shroud has the historically correct manifestation of a man crucified with the nails driven through his wrists! Only an image derived from the Middle East could have properly been reproduced, and as we shall soon see, there was no reproductive capability in that historical period to create that image.
 
Furthermore, the Shroud was not originally made in Europe, necessary for the C-14 results to be valid. The fibers that went into the cloth that became the Shroud of Turin were taken from 42 different kinds of plants, located either in Syria or in Palestine, with the estimated time of its origin to be during the early first century A.D. The cut and dimensions of the Shroud were all unique measurements used in Syria and Palestine for burial coverings in the early first century. That was confirmed by researchers in the 1978 group using test methods from multiple disciplines not used by the 1988 group.
 
What was also devastating to the 1988 findings were results of two subsequent experiments made on portions of the 1988 sample. First, was a study of possible flower images on the Shroud. Noted Israeli botanist Dr. Avinoam Danin studied with upgraded test instruments the "flower images" found on the Shroud, for the presence of flower images; and found something extraordinary. His findings, released in 1997, showed that there were 28 images, 27 of which came from near Jerusalem, many of them unique versions of such flowers which only existed during the first century A.D, and which evolved into more modern versions of such flowers afterward. That discovery demonstrated that the Shroud had to be used in an actual burial in the land of Israel in the first century A.D., during the time of Jesus.

That harmonized with the findings of Dr. Max Frei, a noted Swiss criminologist, who in 1973 took dust samples from the Shroud that contained pollen, with permission of the guardian church in Turin. He discovered 22 pollen species from plants that are unique to areas around Constantinople and Edessa, cities in modern-day Turkey (now Istanbul and Urfa), two cities in which historical records state the Shroud once resided, and 7 pollen species from plants common only to the Middle East. Both Dr. Frei and Dr. Danin's findings confirm another important element supporting the Shroud's authenticity, the early historical background concerning the Shroud's existence and its travels, which are as follows:

The Shroud, assuming it was the shroud that wrapped the temporarily lifeless body of Jesus in A.D. 32, was first bought, according to the Gospel of John, by Joseph of Arimathea, who we talked about earlier. The use of linen shrouds was a common custom in the ancient Near East, and the practice endures to the present day. The Shroud measures exactly 2 x 8 Syrian cubits, an ancient form of measurement used uniformly in that area of the world in Jesus' time. The Bible also says that, after the resurrection of Jesus, that Peter and John, who were two of Jesus' chief followers, ran to the tomb after being informed by several women that Jesus was no longer dead, but seen by them alive. Peter and John, the Bible says, did NOT believe the women that so told them of the resurrection, but ran to the tomb out of perplexity. I discussed them before, but I’ll share more about Peter and John, and the women who first saw the empty tomb and the risen Jesus, shortly.
 
After the resurrection, little is said about the Shroud in history, that is according to traditional history among the Christian churches of the Mideast prior to A.D. 70, when the Roman general Titus, in quelling a major Jewish war in Palestine, destroyed Jerusalem, burning the world-famous Jewish Temple (That itself was a direct fulfillment of a prediction Jesus made two days before His death). One of the Christians apparently took the Shroud to Edessa (Urfa), Turkey to spare the Shroud from destruction. The Christian community there took responsibility to protect the Shroud from theft and ruin, hiding it inside the fortified walls surrounding the city in the second century, concealing it during a general persecution by the Roman emperor Trajan, and later Roman persecutions. After Christianity triumphed over paganism in the early fourth century A.D., the Christians in Edessa made it a manner of honor to be the guardians of the Shroud, especially after a severe flood destroyed most of Edessa in 525, and the cloth was rediscovered while the walls were rebuilt. The Shroud was then known as "The Image of Edessa," and later was called the "Mandylion."
 
After 622 the followers of Islam, following the teaching of Mohammed, engaged in a long protracted program of war against the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine Empire, with the express intent of destroying Christianity and all other religions and forcing the world to accept Islam. In the 10th century the Muslims attacked and conquered Edessa. Alarmed that the Shroud would fall into Muslim hands, the Byzantine Imperial Army liberated Edessa in 944. The Byzantines took the Shroud and brought it to Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey), and presented it to their emperor. The Eastern Orthodox Christians had established a museum filled with artifacts of the early history of Christianity, and they made the Shroud the central attraction of that museum. Unlike what modern secular historians might say, the museum's curators had a rigorous program of authenticating any item they would keep in the museum, which was dedicated, like museums today in the modern world, to preserving the history and heritage of the Christian faith, the foundation of the then-Christianized Eastern Roman Empire.

That museum lasted until 1204, when Constantinople, ironically betrayed by the Roman Catholic Church, was invaded and sacked by the Fourth Crusade, and the Mandylion disappeared from public view. The Catholic crusaders entered the museum and made off with its artifacts, where many of the nobility of Europe would use them as heirlooms to justify their place of authority during a time of unfortunate religious ignorance and superstition. The most likely explanation for what happened to the Shroud, however, is that the knights most dedicated to what Christian faith existed at that time, the Knights Templar, took the Shroud, keeping it secretly in the House of DeCharney of France, who was one of the leading members of that knightly order. In 1353, Geoffrey DeCharney publicly revealed possession of the Shroud in Lirey, France.

The Shroud was in the public possession of the DeCharney family until 1452, when Geoffrey DeCharney's granddaughter sold the Shroud to the Duke of Savoy in exchange for two castles. The Duke's family kept the Shroud as a family heirloom, considered the sign of their authority being blessed by God. However, in 1532 a fire in the family chapel in Chambery, France nearly destroyed the Shroud, severely damaging the outer portions of the linen, necessitating substitute fabrics to be built into the damaged portions along its edge (which ironically included the samples used in 1988, not the authentic bulk area of the Shroud which contains the image of Jesus Himself).

In 1578 the Duke moved the Shroud to Turin, Italy, where it remains to this day. While earlier history is more sketchy prior to 1353, there is sufficient information, especially in recent times, to make this historical reconstruction highly plausible.

And in 1999, Dr. Leo Garza-Valdez, a microbiologist at the University of Texas-San Antonio, released results of tests of the incredibly real-looking blood sample-images on part of the Shroud. What he came up with was that the assertions of some, that the blood images were oil or vermilion-based paint, was patently false. He positively concluded that the images were real AB positive blood, that flowed from very real human wounds that came from the individual whose image was imprinted on the Shroud.

The problem of the whole notion that the Shroud was a fake, a work of art, is made actually more unlikely by the Carbon 14 analysis. Because the image is no work of art--not even close. It is not the work of an artist---a real human body under the sheet, blood on the Shroud is real human blood from actual wounds on the actual body which lay underneath, Roman coins over the eyes from 29-33 A.D., pollen and plant images from Israel, and so many other convincing evidences point toward accuracy, down to the fact that the wounds were exactly the way the Gospels portray it, in contradiction to traditional Roman Catholic tradition. Who was the artist in the 12th century who could have produced this superficial, negative, 3-D image in all of its medical detail without the use of known art substances, techniques, or for that matter---who in medieval Europe would have a digital camera???!!! As kids in America say, "Like, Duh!"
 
And one other thing about the carbon 14 not previously pointed out. A split second burst of neutron radiation can alter the carbon date by over a thousand years. If the Shroud is authentic, the answer to that question is supplied very simply. When God the Father raised Jesus-God the Son, from the dead, a powerful burst of radiating energy could supercharge the whole body to life! Dr. Frankenstein would have loved to get that kind of power!

And the historical background of the Shroud is supported by all this evidence. As we said before, the Bible says that it was Joseph of Arimathea who claimed the body of Jesus. And it was he who covered the body in the Shroud. And when he rose on that first Sunday which Christians everywhere call Easter, and the two of Jesus' lead followers, Peter and John, entered the tomb, the Bible says they looked at the grave clothes laid in a heap to the side of the inner stone bed, and "looked in astonishment." And when they did, "they saw and believed." Believed at the moment they looked at those grave clothes--at the Shroud! We can't conclusively prove it, but to behold the image on the Shroud would certainly shake two men previously convinced that he was dead, and Jesus' body merely stolen, that He was indeed risen from the dead. They saw the image, complete with the wounds exactly as it was on his body, the crown of thorns, the stripes by the Roman whips, the bruises from the beatings by both Roman soldiers and Jewish temple guards, the nail prints in the exact places on the wrists where Jesus stood, impaled for six hours on the cross, and the presence of the gaping wound from the Roman javelin, plunged into his body, and the presence of NO broken bones on his bodily image. And consider the fact that, like the Bible says, Jesus' legs were not broken. That was almost an automatic procedure at the close of crucifixion in Palestine, to hasten death of the condemned victim. That itself virtually destroys the chance that this image on the Shroud belongs to another man of Jesus' time.

It is the image of the body of Jesus of Nazareth, superimposed upon the shroud that covered him, at the moment that the power of God exploded from inside him, enabling Him to rise from the dead.

In summary, the evidence is overwhelming that the image on the Shroud of Turin is the image of Jesus of Nazareth. It is unmistakable that the Shroud is "the smoking gun" demonstrating that the Gospels’ account of the Resurrection of Jesus is not only true, but compellingly true, in every particular. What is the significance of the Shroud? Well, if it’s not self-evident to you, I’ll spell it out.

God is not interested in playing games with people, and His insistence that we accept Him by faith. He understands that to compel all people to accept the Bible as entirely true, and the claim that Jesus is His Son, and part of the true trinity-God, without any logical or historical or scientific or other reliable evidence is to make demands on people that would just be too much for them. So God has placed in the universe, the earth in particular, and in history, all sorts of proofs, evidences, facts emerging both from the Bible’s accounts and from outside of it, that give compelling physical, testimonial, scientific, and logical evidence that everything that the Bible declares, the claims of who Jesus is, and even about God Himself, is absolutely true. And to top it all off---He left us with an unmistakable image of His Son, that takes His story out of old, dust-covered antiquity and leaps out into our modern age, literally shouting that it is real, not fable or myth—but reality!
 
Why would God do all this? Simple. I said it before. HE LOVES YOU! He has an intelligence vast enough to be personally acquainted with you, out of the whole universe, out of all the creatures on earth or elsewhere, and He passionately wants a relationship with you, as a good Father to his son/daughter. He wants that relationship to be deep, loving, and more profoundly respectful to you and your own hopes, dreams, and legitimate desires than you realize. And He knows that such a deep relationship, one that encompasses every dimension of life, is not possible for humans to have with one they cannot see, unless faith lives in their hearts. And that faith must be nurtured with proof, reasons that can sustain the most stout scrutiny. When it exists in the heart, such faith in Jesus of Nazareth as God Almighty can sustain a man or woman through all the seasons of life, good and bad, even in the face of the most terrible of experiences---war, disease, suffering of every kind.

We’ll now go on to the next place in the Re-Introduction of Christianity, which after all, is the Re-Introduction of Jesus of Nazareth. That is, how do we come to know this God, this Jesus of Nazareth?

It's been a few days, I admit, but it's not forgotten. I will take up where I left off, on proofs for the resurrection of Jesus, and as a result, proof that Jesus of Nazereth is the true and living God of the Universe.

THE RESURRECTION: YEP, I DIDN’T STUTTER!

There is, even if there is no direct eyewitness evidence of the resurrection of Jesus, several significant and startling evidences of His rising. And we start by returning to the burial scene. First, in the early morning of the Sunday which most Christians call Easter, the 30 or so soldiers are found, wide awake, standing guard, but unsuspecting what is to happen. According to ancient historians in places as far away as the North American Mayans and South American Incas, a series of major earthquakes took place both on the Friday on which Jesus died, and on the day of His resurrection an earthquake in Jerusalem took place. According to Matthew and Luke, the earthquake was bad enough, but angels came to the tomb and rolled the 800-lb. stone from its place, where it dropped horizontally to the ground, with one of the angels sitting upon it. It said the guards became filled with terror and fainted, becoming like dead men. At that point, Jesus rose from the dead and left.

The guards, upon reviving, discover the grave to be empty and flee in renewed terror, for now it’s the terror of being cooked alive in their armor. In desperation, they run to the Jewish chief priests, who, for some money instruct them to spread the message in Jerusalem that the (frightened, cowering, disillusioned) disciples stole Jesus’ body during the night, with the priests’ promise to protect them from fatal retribution from Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor.

Only 50 days later the disciples of Jesus are in the hundreds, brazenly declaring that Jesus is alive, that He’s God, Israel’s promised Messiah, and the Savior of all mankind. For all that, while the Jewish religious leaders are desperately trying to stop the apostles and other followers of Jesus from spreading their message, not once is there a production of a dead body to discredit the followers of Jesus. Is there any plausible basis for that?

Well, before you get to the huge amount of eyewitness testimony, there is two important pieces of evidence that shouts out the resurrection. One was the inability of the Jews and Romans to produce the body of Jesus. That has already been touched upon. The other was the grave clothes.

The grave clothes were made up, as was said before, of strips of cloth, that went over a shroud, with a head cloth over the head. The strips of cloth were basted through and through with the 75 pounds of myrrh and aloes that once hardened took on the composition of concrete. In the gospel of John there is an account of some women who had gone to the tomb that Easter Sunday morning but found it wide open, with no body inside (more on that later). They had gone to the upper story one-room apartment where the apostles were hiding, in morbid fear of the Jews and Romans. These women told what they saw to Peter and John, who went flying out the door like bats out of hell. John went on to say that he beat Peter to the tomb, because he was younger and faster. When he got to the entrance to the tomb, seeing the stone lying flat on the ground, he stopped, whereupon Peter brushed by him and went inside. Then John followed, and saw that the shroud was folded separately, with the headpiece to the side of the stone resting place where the body of Jesus used to lie. The strips of cloth, concrete mold and all, had popped open, and were lying in a pile at the foot of the stone base. When John saw all that, he said that he believed (John 20:1-8). Why?

First, he saw that the strips of cloth were all lying in that pile. Now who in the name of common sense would steal a dead body, and take off all the strips of cloth, with the mess of cracking open that heavy molding, taking off the shroud, the headcloth, and carry off a rotting, decomposing body that had been through multiple beating, whip, and puncture wounds. There was nothing in the Romans or the Jews that would motivate them to take the body like that. And He didn’t have it, and even if John and his comrades wanted to, they certainly wouldn’t go dismantling the corpse’s gear while fighting off 30+ highly trained, highly motivated Roman soldiers.

And second, there was the shroud. THE SHROUD. The Shroud we call the Shroud of Turin. Some call it a fake. But that is the voice of people who want to ignore evidence that is overwhelming that the world-famous Shroud is the one that John saw. And that, more than anything else, was the reason John believed that Jesus was alive. Because, over 1,800 years before the advent of modern photography, John saw a photographic image—the image of Jesus of Nazereth.

But before I get to the Shroud, let’s back it up with the eyewitnesses. More than 500, according to the Apostle Paul. We’ll start with the women who followed Jesus, then His brother, then various appearances of Jesus within the first few days after that first Easter morning, then various appearances of other deeply spiritual people at the same time, then His appearances over a period of 40 days to His disciples and to large groups of others, concluding with His ascension to heaven.


The Women:

The Gospels say that the first people to see anything connected with Jesus’ resurrection were several women who had followed Jesus and His disciples, especially the apostles. (Note: disciples referred to both the twelve apostles, as well as non-apostles who followed Jesus and served Him, sometimes going out to preach His message as well. They went to the tomb, and saw it empty, and at first they ran off, saying that they found nothing but an empty tomb, then returned within an hour. At that time several of them saw an angel, a messenger from God, telling them, “Why seek the living among the dead?” The others ran back first, but one stayed behind, Mary Magdelene.

Mary Magdelene is a woman of whom there is considerable dispute. Some traditions (Lots of Christian concepts come from outside the Bible, which is usually not good, unless there is historical support for it, but more on that later.) say that Mary Magdelene was a prostitute, who the Bible says Jesus forgave, in the story found in Luke chapter 7. But the Bible doesn’t say the name of the woman in that story. Historical research in the last few decades indicate that Mary Magdelene was actually a very decent woman, of great personal wealth, who had been afflicted with a horrible disease caused by being possessed by seven demons—servants of Satan (more on that later, too). The Bible confirms that Jesus cast the demons out of Mary, making her physically and emotionally whole, and that she repaid Him by being a devoted follower, supporting Him financially in His ministry and getting other women to do the same. (Jesus showed an appreciation and respect for these women that many Christians and members of other religions have not shown over the years, but more on that later.)

It was to Mary that Jesus makes his first resurrection appearance. And at this point, it gets to the issue of either it’s all true or they’re all liars. She doesn’t know what to think, she’s inconsolable with grief, and stays in front of the tomb crying. She still thinks the body is stolen.

The reason that Christians universally believe that the resurrection of Jesus is so central to their faith is because they believe that it is an actual event. It is not a make-believe story symbolic of the eternal hope of mankind or the redemptive power of suffering, or anything else that sounds nice but doesn’t have substantive value. It is an actual event, with actual consequences that are more relevant to each human being on earth than any other event that any human being will ever have. Love, marriage, children, education, war, political change, natural disasters, work and achievement—all are worthless if there is no positive future past death. Jesus’ conquest of death took out the question mark in death and put an emphatic exclamation mark in its place.

Jesus’ Appearance to His Brother, James:

In the 15th chapter of the book we call 1st Corinthians, the Apostle Paul wrote that one of the first appearances of Jesus after He rose from the dead was to his brother, James. Yeah, I know, the entire Roman Catholic Church says that Mary, Jesus’ mom, stayed a virgin, all her life, and that Jesus had only cousins. Well, while I don’t have any problems with the many Catholics who have a deep loving relationship with Jesus, the original language of the Bible, in the gospels of Mark, Luke, and John, specifically say that he had brothers and sisters, by Mary. The Bible teaches that she was a virgin until she bore Jesus, but afterward she and her husband Joseph did what all happily married couples want to do, they had great sex and made babies. (One can only imagine the relief Joseph and Mary had when they could finally have a normal sex life together!).

Well, James was the first of four brothers and at least two sisters born to Mary and Joseph after Jesus birth. When their dad, Joseph, died, and Jesus left to start his ministry, James took over the place of male head of the family. Now you would expect one of two things to happen in a household with the Son of God at the top, no neutrality here, they either loved and were devotedly loyal to Jesus’, or they were insanely jealous and rejected Him, and the story that their parents probably told them.

Unfortunately, the latter was the case. The indication from the few accounts in the gospels about Jesus’ family was that they had NO respect for Him and His claim to deity. On at least two occasions they yanked up Mary and the girls, and, James in the lead, tried to bust up meetings Jesus was holding, claiming that He was insane. Once, when Jesus was home before everyone went to one of the sacred Jewish feasts in Jerusalem, James and all the brothers (Joseph, Jr., Jude, and Simon) began trying to give him political advice on when to go to Jerusalem and get public attention, treating Him like a big joke. The Apostle John bluntly said that their motive was disrespect, because Jesus’ siblings did not believe in Him (John 7).

In fact, on one occasion Jesus went back to Nazareth, to the town synagogue, and publicly read from a passage of the book of Isaiah, the 61st chapter, one that predicted the mission and purpose of the Messiah. He boldly said that with His words, in their ears that day, the Scriptures are fulfilled—in Him. Another one of Jesus’ claims to be God that makes so many people uncomfortable, and on this day that included His own hometown. Those pious worshipers turned into a howling, raging mob, who drove Him out of the synagogue and up to the brow of the high hill upon which the town was built. They fully intended to throw him off, and lynch him—kill him. Amazingly, He turned around and stared down His old neighbors, His would-be murderers, and walked away.

But what is interesting is that, in His hometown, His old synagogue, among people He had known from childhood, who had all gone wild with rage and rejection, His brothers and sisters are notable for their silence! James and the whole family did not lift one finger or utter one word in their brother’s defense! They were more concerned about their good name with the neighbors than their brother’s life! Why? Because they absolutely rejected Him as anything more than a fraud, simply wanting to become a public figure. And a good, orthodox Jew would turn on his own brother, if he falsely claimed to be God---for to them there was, and is, only one God, and He is not a man. Therefore, they were willing to do nothing for Jesus. That was the state of matters in the family of Jesus bar Joseph.

But how did it end? Paul wrote that Jesus appeared to James immediately after He rose from the dead, and that many witnesses were alive at the time to verify it (1 Corinthians 15). Luke wrote, in his Gospel, that Jesus told the women who were the first to see him alive again to “tell my brothers about this, and Peter.” (Luke 24). James and his brothers and sisters are well-documented in history by men like Josephus of what happened after the resurrection, they did a complete 180deg. turnaround! All of them became devout Christians, and some were notable leaders in the early church. Jude and James both wrote books that were placed in the collection, called the canon, of Scripture, in the New Testament. All of them died violent martyr’s deaths because of their faith in the brother they had so completely rejected.

And James was the most dramatic in the turnaround he made about Jesus. Not only did he become a follower, he became an apostle of Jesus, not only writing his book, but he became the chief leader of the Christian community in Jerusalem and Israel, which in his time numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Even men like the Apostles Peter and Paul submitted to his leadership position (Acts 15, 21). What is more, the historian Josephus and ancient Christian historians note that James got that position on merit, not through family connections. He was so renowned for his spirituality and his integrity that he became known as James the Just, who prayed so often that he developed deep callouses on his knees.

One could say that mere guilt could make him turn to serving a dead Jesus’ memory, but the entire early church uniformly agreed that it was not the memory of his dead brother that energized James to faith, but the memory of his risen brother that did. While Paul had many enemies in the church at that time, trying to discredit everything he said or did, not one of them dared to contradict his statement of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearance to James, or to any of the others Paul referred to.

That list of people included Peter, all the apostles, and to over 500 people at one time. And Paul did not simply say they were a handful of individual appearances, but a considerable number. And Luke, Paul’s close friend and ministry associate, went even further, without rebuttal from one single Christian. (And if you know Christians, it doesn’t take much to get a disagreement going.) He said that Jesus spent most of the forty days that immediately followed His resurrection with his closest followers, teaching them, refreshing their understanding on the things He taught in His earlier ministry, and giving them instructions for the work that lay ahead, spreading His message to the entire world.

What evidence do we have to support such claims? Two sets of information to start with. One, that not one of all the people who were in the church of the first century, or of any century since, have disputed the claims of every single one of His followers that He was alive, no sense of controversy over His resurrection.

Second, and most dramatic, was the change that resurrection had on His followers. I’ll describe it this way. Prior to His death, the Apostles and the other followers of Jesus were proud, almost cocky, about their future as leaders in a future earthly court of Jesus, King of Israel, victor over the Roman Empire, a nation greater than any in history. They jockeyed for high position in His inner circle. John and James ben Zebedee, two of Jesus apostles, got their mother, who was Mary’s sister, to appeal to him to make them His two chief rulers in His future kingdom. Their ministry throughout Israel was with the idea of gaining political power. Even though they were empowered by Jesus to go out on two different occasions to preach to villages throughout Israel, healing the sick, exorcising demons out of people, and gaining converts, they saw it only as prelude to an earthly kingdom of Jesus. Even though Jesus repeatedly warned them of a darker future for Him and them, the idea completely eluded their reasoning.

When He was arrested, tortured, and crucified, His death came at them as though from nowhere. Peter, who hours before Jesus’ arrest pledged his undying loyalty, and attempted to defend Jesus at His arrest with his sword, wounding one of His captors, turned and denied three times that he even knew Jesus, within just three hours of His capture. Judas Iscariot betrayed Him for thirty pieces of silver, which was the going price for a common slave. The rest of them scattered to the four winds. While John made it through the trial and crucifixion near Jesus, with Mary and the other women supporters of Jesus, everyone was completely demoralized. In fact, the whole populace of approximately 3,000,000 in Jerusalem for Passover (typically attendance at 1st century Jewish feasts) was recorded by Luke as having gone home devastated, “beating their breasts” over Jesus’ death (Luke 23:47). All the gospel writers depict the apostles as completely dejected, in a small private house, with the doors locked and bolted for fear of the Romans and the Jews.

But fifty days later, for no other reason than their assertion that Jesus had conquered death for the eternal salvation of the entire human race, these same clueless, cowering followers of His were fearlessly declaring that God’s Spirit had come upon them, and that Jesus was God. They went on to say that over 500 of His followers personally witnessed Jesus, risen from the dead, rise up into the sky and into heaven. They also went on to declare, with a straight face, that two angels from God came down instantly, and told them that Jesus had gone into heaven and would one day return in the same way they saw Him ascend.

They converted thousands on that day, and they never looked back. And except for John, all of them suffered a violent death, and he was imprisoned, tortured, unsuccessfully boiled in oil, and exiled for some three or more years. The ways that they were executed included: crucifixion upside down (Peter), crucifixion upright (Matthew), crucifixion diagonally (Andrew), beheading, beating with a halberd, beating with heavy rods, stoning, being impaled with a spear, trampled and beaten by a howling mob, the list goes on. And those they converted---Amnesty International would have fits over the multi-varied ways the followers of Jesus in those early centuries (and today) suffered and died.

But it’s the complete about face, the dramatic turn of these followers, based solely upon their declaration of Jesus’ resurrection, which provides powerful circumstantial evidence. Powerful indeed, in the face of the fact that if they recanted and disavowed that singular claim, every one of them would have been spared. All argument to the contrary notwithstanding, people don’t turn from cowards to death-defying heroes on a dime on behalf of a lie. But let’s go to the next evidence of the same kind---the Apostle Paul.

That guy, known to Jews as Rabbi Saul ben Hillel, was set to slaughter tens of thousands, and did jail and killed thousands, using his power as a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin-the ruling council. He was single-minded in his honest rejection of Jesus of Nazereth as Messiah (Jewish/Hebrew word for Christ), and in his belief that those who believed in Jesus should die a traitor’s death for endangering the nation of Israel with God’s judgment. And as an extremely well-educated man, in both Jewish and Roman law, he was well-trained in the arts of persuasion. This man was a serious adversary for the new Christian faith if ever there was one.

Yet today Paul is known as St. Paul, considered the greatest of Christian evangelists. He single-handedly wrote half of the New Testament. He is credited with transforming Christianity from merely one of many Jewish factions into a world-wide movement that was embraced by people from every race of men, and swept into Europe. As a result of his work, Paul set Christianity on the road to becoming the foundation for Western civilization, and eventually the civilization of much of the world. It was his effective writing that made early Christianity highly effective, with its decentralized and localized structure, and its practical emphasis on individual responsibility in one’s relationship to God. He was known to walk into a city and in a few weeks convert tens of thousands.

What would make a man like him do such a 180? He gave the answer. He was deputized by the chief priests in Jerusalem to go to Damascus, Syria, to arrest Jewish believers in Jesus and lead them back for judgment and certain death in Jerusalem. While on the way, he was, before witnesses, struck down by a blinding light from heaven and experienced a confrontation with the now-resurrected Jesus of Nazareth, who was now in his glorified state as God the Son. In that confrontation, Jesus, rather than strike Paul dead in His rage, forgave Paul and gave him the commission to carry the message to the world.

What would make Paul make such a dramatic change? Guilt over his prior atrocities? That alternative, the only other one, is untenable for one reason---he was a pious orthodox Jew. And as such a dedicated Jew, part of the same sect of Pharisees that were Jesus’ biggest opponents, he considered any Jew who would declare that a mere man was equal to God the most hated of enemies, and a blasphemer of God. And blasphemy was equal to treason. And in that time, slaughtering thousands of traitors was no more a trouble to Paul’s conscience than was the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki a problem to most Americans in 1945, which it wasn’t.

The fact is, the only thing that would make a totally devout Jew like Paul make a change like that was total, irrefutable evidence that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God, the promised Messiah the Jews long for even today. And there was no evidence this Roman/Jewish lawyer and judge produces to support his claim but the most powerful one of all—direct testimonial identification of Jesus in His glory. And Paul stuck by that claim, through prison, shipwreck, destruction of reputation, whippings and beatings, and finally death by beheading. To paraphrase what I said before, men don’t turn from being an enemy to a devoted friend, at the sacrifice of one’s own life, all with full knowledge that the cause one embraces is a flat out lie.

But let’s move on to more physical evidence, possibly the most controversial of all—the Shroud of Turin.
COX.net for San Diego

Hi, this is me again. I'll be enclosing the next installment of Re-Intro, on proofs for the unique position of Jesus of Nazereth as God of the universe. Hope it makes you consider Him, and think some new thoughts about whether all this about Jesus and His claims may have serious merit. Anyway, hope your week was good. Talk to you later.

THE DEATH OF JESUS:

A lot of people have died some pretty hideous deaths, right up to today. When you read of Hitler’s Holocaust, the horrors of Stalin and Mao in the Soviet Union and China under communism, and the mass executions and “acid baths” done by Saddam Hussein in Iraq in recent years, you get no doubt of the capacity of human beings to be really sick and macabre in their brutality of each other. When you examine the account of the execution of Jesus of Nazereth, especially as analyzed by respected physicians, you immediately recognize that the torture and execution He suffered was of such sadistic quality to match any of them. So to discuss them, I’ll cite just some of the suffering Jesus endured as stated in the New Testament. And I’ll refer you back to the previous chapter on the Bible’s historical validity if you’re wondering about whether the account is accurate.

It’s late March—early April, probably in about 32 A.D. (other scholars disagree, but the best evidence would support this date as the time of Jesus’ death). The time of Jesus’ arrest, which took place early on the Friday of Passover week, shortly after midnight, is that of any man who had been eating and drinking what Jews today call the Seder meal. Jesus is under high stress, and He is very tired as a result of the food, wine, and the energy sucked out of Him due to that stress. He is shuttled to a series of trials within just a few hours, with no sleep throughout—total sleep deprivation.

During the course of that series of seven different legal (that’s the stretch of all time) proceedings that were each a gross miscarriage of justice he is punched, beaten, slapped, pommeled by “rods” that were larger and stronger than most modern-day police nightsticks, and ultimately whipped with a flogging whip made of horsehide and bone. In the last of those occurrences, a whipping that was administered several dozen times, based on Roman practice, the Romans who took Jesus into custody by transfer of the Jewish leaders who arrested him beat him so badly that his internal organs were showing, and the sum total of the amount of blood Jesus lost was so great that his blood pressure was horribly low. Most men died from the flogging the Romans would impose on prisoners prior to crucifixion, after which the Romans would merely be crucifying a corpse.

Once Jesus was condemned to be crucified by the Roman governor of that time, Pontius Pilate, He was, at about 6-7 a.m., compelled to carry His cross, the instrument of his execution through the streets of what is now close to two miles, up to the place of His execution, on the other side of Jerusalem. Imagine doing that having been horribly mistreated just a few hours before. Already completely dehydrated, with dozens of openly exposed wounds, plus internal organs engaged in internal bleeding, Jesus collapses under the weight of the cross twice, after which He is relieved of His burden by another man, grabbed at random from the surrounding crowd by His Roman guards, but is not relieved of the requirement to walk the remainder of the distance to the site of His execution.

At that location Jesus is nailed to the cross, between two thieves, and is transfixed for approximately six hours, after which time He dies at about 3 in the afternoon. During that time, observed by literally hundreds of thousands, possibly as many as 3,000,000 people in Jerusalem for the Passover feast at that time, He is in a contorted position where He either dies from asphyxiation from being unable to breathe in a slumped position, or from a burst artery from the stress of raising himself to breathe only to push His limbs to the breaking point, an act that inflicts maximum pain and torture. Amnesty International would be screaming for multiple trials for the ultimate in human rights abuse. And the stress, total dehydration, and complications from His multiple wounds leave His lungs, intestines, liver, and other internal organs in a state of mush. Most men died before being nailed to their cross or almost immediately thereafter, leaving only a corpse to serve the punishment of crucifixion. Most men who get through this much would be demanding the vengeance of God, or of whatever he would believe in, on just about anything that moved.

However, at no time did Jesus do so. It’s an old story, but still remarkable. Jesus forgave His enemies, looked after the needs of His mother, comforted and blessed a common thief who waited until death to declare his faith, cried out His perplexity at what seemed to be His Father-God’s total abandonment of Him, spiritually as well as physically (more on that later), still turned and committed His spirit into that same Father’s hands, and declared His work on earth finished. The only consideration of His physical needs Jesus expressed the whole time was when He simply said he was thirsty. These are not the reactions of a typical man. No wonder a battle-hardened veteran Roman officer stated that “Truly this man was the Son of God.” To describe His conduct as heroic would be an insult. This went far beyond that.

And the amazement is that He repeatedly told both His disciples and the Jewish people in general, even down to the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate, that what He was enduring was being done with His consent, and that it was preprogrammed to happen to Him before the world began! It isn’t a desire to die, no, He begged His Father-God the night before to spare Him if possible. It was allowed because He openly declared that mankind was separated from God by their evil heart and evil deeds, and that only death by a perfectly sinless God-man could deliver the human race from everlasting eternal punishment in a very real hell, which by the way, Jesus believed in emphatically. In fact, Jesus is recorded as having led the way of His entourage into Jerusalem five days before His death, “with His face like flint.” In Spanish Bibles Jesus is described at this point as “El Matador.” Braver than a bullfighter. Some kind of complement, don’t you know?.

At the point of His death, though, all sorts of interesting occurrences start popping up, that make it not only verifiable that He died, but that Jesus died as an act of His will, and that support His claim of Deity, and make the claims that He rose from the dead all the more remarkable. First, the fact that at the moment of death he “cried out, ‘It is finished,’ clearly shows a full-throated roar, that He intended that all the massive multitude hear Him. (Incredibly, no doubt for the benefit of the Roman soldiers and officials there, “It is finished” in Latin was the official declaration of victory by Roman generals in major battles.) But in nearly all instances of crucifixion, the cause of death is asphyxiation, the condemned is too tired to raise himself up to breathe, and so, slumped down, literally strangles. Nobody engages in shouting at the top of his lungs at death. So experienced physicians around the world who have analyzed the circumstances of the Gospel accounts, coupled with knowledge of the punishment of those condemned to crucifixion, have determined that Jesus died from another cause.

He died from a myocardial infarction, which only happens when the heart, enlarged from stress usually coming, not from injury or trauma, but from grief, literally bursts through the periodontic sac surrounding the heart, and collapses, resulting in instant death. Jesus of Nazereth literally died of a broken heart! And He called for that death upon His pronouncement that His work of being a perfect, sinless man, was done. That should tell you something about whether, at that moment, Jesus was still thinking about us, rather than about Him. It would also tell you that with an exploded heart, nobody revives from that.

Second, Luke, the renowned physician who wrote the third Gospel which bears his name, noted another powerful evidence that Jesus died, as did John, the Apostle many believe closest to Jesus and who wrote the fourth Gospel, some 70 years after Jesus’ life on earth, about 100 A.D. A Roman soldier, inspecting the bodies of the three condemned men before removing them at the close of the day, thrust his long javelin, with a spear tip several inches across, right into His side, with blood and water flowing forth.

That observation is huge. As anyone who knows hemotology, the study of blood, knows, when death has occurred to an individual that after about a few hours the platelet composition of blood changes—the plasma and water begin to separate. If water is flowing from a wound or body cavity mixed with blood, it is a sure sign that death has occurred and the person has been dead for at least a couple of hours. And you don’t stand a chance of reviving after that happens.

There are some who have written whole books seeking to discredit the resurrection of Jesus, and for generations untold. The two that come to mind are Richard Schofield’s The Passover Plot, and Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian. These guys, both renowned philosophers, put out the contention that Jesus was never completely dead, that he just swooned because of his punishment and was revived while in the tomb, and was rescued by his disciples. Well, a liar would have to go pretty far to go to the detail of noticing the separation of blood and water after the piercing of Jesus’ side (which went into his heart) in any elaborate tale. And note that there is universal agreement by the early church that the details of Jesus’ death are correct, especially the thousands of direct witnesses of his death. The separation of blood and water eliminates any alternative theories concerning His death that do not assume the actual death of Jesus.

The Burial of Jesus—Never Overlook the Obvious

There’s so much that literally shouts out evidence of Jesus’ rising from the dead from just the way He was buried. The Bible says he was buried a short distance away from the site of the cross, in the tomb of a wealthy man named Joseph of Arimathea. To overlook the events surrounding that is a big mistake indeed, because the truth is, literally, as obvious as an empty grave.

I mean, you might say, “You have to look for evidence that Jesus is alive to prove He rose, right? You can’t look for evidence that He is dead and in the grave to prove your claim that your dead god is alive—capiche?” To which I say, yeah, I’m not going to show that He is dead, but that He was dead. In other words, I’m showing you, just like a crime scene investigator, that there is all sorts of evidence of Jesus’ resurrection in the nature of His burial—right from the grave site!

The first fact the CSI guy, looking at the grave of Jesus, is the nature of how he was buried. The man who buried him, Joseph of Arimathea, knew what the Jewish burial customs of that day were to be. Seventy-five pounds of myrrh and aloes were used, with strips of cloth, to wrap Jesus’ body. Myrrh and aloes made a dandy enbalming fluid, and they had to, because in the hot climate of Jerusalem-area Israel dead bodies have a way of swelling, hitting rigor mortis, and DECOMPOSING! EEEYOUUU! So to prevent it from happening to Jesus’ very dead and mutilated body real fast, Joseph moved quickly, along with his friend and fellow moderate Sanhedrin member Nicodemus, and enbalmed the body. And something else that people who study ancient customs note: when myrrh and aloes are applied, like a paste, over the tight, mummy-like strips of cloth, with a separate headcloth, over a dead body, when it dries, it takes on the composition of concrete! In other words, Joseph of Arimathea stuck Jesus’ body in a “cement overcoat.” There is one group that has used that technique in the modern world—the Mafia! If Jesus wasn’t dead before, he is now!

And what’s more, he was placed in a “new tomb.” Tombs of rich men, which Joseph was, were hewn out of solid rock in the hillsides outside of the cities of that time, including Jerusalem. It was dark, and it would be covered by a stone that weighed almost 800 pounds! After a few hours the air pockets would be depleted, causing anyone trapped alive inside to die. Just think, if Jesus’ wasn’t dead, He would have to overcome his hideous wounds, the trauma of the past 24 hours, get out of his “cement overcoat” of myrrh, aloes, and strips of cloth, be able to breathe in an air-tight compartment that was the cave in which He was kept, and singlehandedly roll away an 800-pound stone to get out.

On top of that, Jesus would have had to fight through a squad of at least 30 Roman soldiers, which the gospels all call, “a detachment”, but which scholars who studied the Roman army of Jesus’ day would recognize to be a group of about that number. They guarded Jesus’ tomb under orders of Pontius Pilate, by the request of the Jewish chief priests. And the guard was sent there on the day after Jesus was buried, a Saturday. A seal was then placed over the tombstone, which made the gravesite under Roman authority. Anyone escaping from the tomb, or anyone taking the body away, and the guards would all be burned alive in their own armor. NOBODY WENT TO SLEEP ON DUTY THAT NIGHT!

Some have argued that the disciples of Jesus stole His body from the tomb. The Jewish leaders spread that rumor at the time of His resurrection. But there was no evidence, from any historical source, that the disciples went to the gravesite, took on the best soldiers in the history of the world hand to hand, defeated them, took Jesus or His body out of the tomb, and got away. And what’s more, they eluded capture by the Romans so brazenly, that they were able to show up in the middle of Jerusalem 50 days later, and boldly proclaim that Jesus rose from the dead to tens of thousands! No way the Romans would have let people who engaged in criminal assault on Roman soldiers in the line of duty live five minutes, once they emerged in public… they were very dead people. Yet they weren’t touched by the Romans, because they had done nothing.

And on top of that, the gospel writers were not very kind to the Apostles—themselves. They were hiding like scared rabbits. In all four gospels, they testify that the men closest to Jesus turned tail and ran like swimmers from a shark after His arrest. One of them denied He even knew Jesus (Simon Peter—the lead apostle), and the rest hung out in shame far from Him. “The disciples were together, with the doors securely locked because of the Jews.” (John 20:25?). These guys included Matthew, who was the author of the first Gospel, Peter, who most scholars believe dictated the second Gospel to Mark, who was given the honor of putting his name on it rather than the self-effacing Peter, and John, who was closest to Jesus and wrote the fourth Gospel.

In almost any other work of literature, including histories, writers who would themselves be in the story they write would be making themselves look like heroes. But not here, it seems that these writers were on a mission to be so brutally honest with themselves and each other that it resembles a Hollywood tell-all biography. The best example would be Mark, who even tells on himself, by exposing the embarrassing experience as a young teen of being out on that unseasonably warm spring Passover night in Jerusalem wearing only a thin linen tunic. When Jesus was arrested, a temple guard grabbed for Mark, and Mark got away by letting the guard have the tunic while Mark went streakin’ naked through the streets of Jerusalem. And these guys were being hunted by the Jews and Romans, and they knew it. They were in no position to develop a successful suicide plot to attempt to steal Jesus’ body through the squad of Roman soldiers guarding the tomb, nor did they have the motivation to do so. Their only motivation was fear, and their one program was to hide. It takes a bigger reach to believe there was a successful plot to steal the body of Jesus than to believe in His Resurrection.

And yet, the grave was empty. The grave clothes were found unraveled, like someone had popped out of them, the headcloth neatly laid to the side of Jesus’ resting place, and that 800-lb. stone rolled away, right under the noses of those alert Roman guards.

But let’s take a serious look at who buried Him, because that has a unique story all its own . Joseph of Arimathea, who did the honors, was an extremely important man, one of the few members of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish religious-legal council, that voted against the condemnation and execution of Jesus. That is expressed in the gospels of Luke and John.

He was therefore a very rich and powerful man in his country. Tradition expresses that he was even one of the very top of the members of the Sanhedrin. He is described in the gospel of John as having come to privately believe that Jesus was the Son of God, but he kept his new-found convictions secret because of the threat of expulsion by that council—or even worse. He definitely was making his allegiances known in what he did, though. He bought a brand new tomb, no more than two months before Jesus’ death. The original language of the gospels makes that plain. Joseph, like any other rich man with a family under him, would have a separate family tomb, usually in his own home town. So why get a new tomb now? And why get one there, a matter of a few hundred yards from the hill of Golgotha, where Jesus was crucified, and where the Romans at that time routinely would execute criminals? Who would want a memorial built—hewn out of solid rock—no mean expense in any culture—within the clear sight, sound, and smell of men being executed in the most horrible way possible?

A very learned man, Dr. John Morris, who was the founder and president of the Institute for Creation Research in San Diego, California, described the most plausible reason for the importance of Joseph and his friend in the Sanhedrin, Nicodemus. He wrote about these two important men in his book, Many Infallible Proofs. Nicodemus also has an important place in the biography of Jesus, which we’ll tell later. These two men both came to faith in Jesus, and did it the primary way Jewish rabbis have learned just about anything of spiritual value for the last 3,000 years, through the study of the Bible, particularly the Old Testament. And what they found was the reason that they let themselves become instruments of God in what at first was a tragic moment, which turned into the door to the most glorious achievement in the history of mankind. I’ll let Dr. Morris take the description of Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus from here:

“ ‘Jesus the Christ is come in the flesh’ (I John 5:1). The Son of God is
also Son of Man, with both the divine power and the human nature ena-
bling Him both to represent man and to set man free from the evil one.
It is absolutely vital for all men to know beyond any doubt that it was
the human Jesus who rose from the grave. Therefore, it must be certain
that His body was carefully buried after His death, and that this burial was
known to all, both friend and foe. Then, on the great morning when
He arose from the dead, the emptied tomb would stand forever as the infallible proof of His bodily resurrection.

“Such an important [task] as the burial of the body of Jesus could not be entrusted by God to the Roman soldiers, who would merely further defile it and then throw it in with the bodies of other executed criminals, nor to the Jewish authorities who would probably do even worse. Nor would these authorities have permitted it to fall into the hands of His disciples, as they were afraid they would seek to hide it and then claim He had been resurrected…

“The solution was for God to [choose] to have the body buried by two of the members of the governing Jewish body, the Sanhedrin, Joseph and Nicodemus, …. authorities who were also disciples themselves. Thus, they would have access to the necessary information about the time and circumstances of [Jesus] death, they would also have access to the Roman governor in order to make the required arrangements to acquire the body before the soldiers could dispose of it, and they would have enough wealth of their own to be able to make the needed preparations for a suitable resting-place for the body until it could be raised from the dead.

“Of course, they would have to be prepared ahead of time for this ministry. God therefore touched the heart of Nicodemus… [S]ometime later Nicodemus defended Jesus… before the Sanhedrin (John 7:50-51). Similarly, … Joseph [of Arimathea] did not concur in the decision of the Sanhedrin to condemn Jesus (Luke 23:50-51).

“Somehow these two men had become friends and had resolved to make preparations for Jesus’ burial. It seems likely that they may have had other interviews with Jesus, though the [Bible is] silent on this, and perhaps learned from His own lips about His approaching crucifixion. He had, ….told Nicodemus that He must be ‘lifted up,’ ….in order that men might have everlasting life. It hardly seems likely that Nicodemus, Israel’s great teacher, would not try to learn much more about these things, and where better than from Jesus Himself? If nothing else, however, he would surely have gone back to an intensive study of the [Old Testament] ….to learn all he could about the prophesied sacrificial death of the coming Messiah. These earnest studies most likely would have been shared with his friend Joseph.

“Strange also was the fact that Joseph knew exactly when Jesus died, and was immediately able to rush to Pilate with the request for His body, before others even realized He was dead. (Mark 15:43-44). Even stranger was the fact that immediately thereafter came Nicodemus carrying [75]….pounds of [myrrh and aloes] for the burial. Then, while the women [who financially supported Jesus] watched from a distance, no doubt in amazement, these two respected members of the Sanhedrin gently lowered the body from the cross, wound it in the linen clothes, applied the spices and ointments, laid the body in the tomb, and then departed.

“Probably in their studies together during the many months following Nicodemus’ first meeting with Jesus, the two friends spent much time in the 53rd chapter of Isaiah. There especially was the sacrificial and saving work of the Messiah foretold, and this had been the great theme of Jesus’ words to Nicodemus. (John 3:14-21. …. [In] the heart of that great passage is the statement: “And He made His grave with the wicked (thus near the execution and burial) grounds of the condemned criminals, and with a rich man in his death.” (Isaiah 53:9) Therefore,.a rich man must somehow provide a grave for Him even in these unlikely circumstances).

“Joseph somehow decided himself to assume this prophetic obligation. He proceeded to purchase the land, cut out the tomb, plant a garden, purchase the required materials for the burial and hide, and then wait there with Nicodemus until they could perform that service for the Lord for which they had been born.”

See, Morris, Henry, Many Inflallible Proofs, pp. 81-82.

These guys had the presence of mind to realize that Jesus’ death and resurrection was at hand, and that they had the opportunity to be a part of it. Precious few had that temerity, and that included the apostles of Jesus. Over and over again they were told by their Master that He would be captured and murdered, and he predicted exactly how. But they would not have any of it, over and over in the gospel accounts the apostles and Jesus’ other supporters expressed complete denial over the prospect. And the Jewish leaders only wanted to believe that the Messiah to come would come on their terms, a new Moses a new David—a king emblazoned in glory and military power, that would destroy all their enemies. So they had no use for a traveling preacher of modest means, who while not as poor as many in His day, was pathetically poor in comparison to ours, or in comparison to the rich and powerful of His own times.

But God knew that these two men would make sure that Jesus’ burial would be public, and His grave watched over by the last people on earth who would want that body to be moved from that location. And what’s more, there was no way in a world of any reason or logic that Jesus could have survived that much punishment and trauma, and then that kind of burial. The dude was dead! And what’s more, if He didn’t rise on His own by a supernatural event, He was going to stay right there---forever—and rot, and disintegrate to dust!

BUT THAT DID NOT HAPPEN!


We'll deal with the proofs of Jesus' sole divinity through the most amazing event of all time...His Resurrection, and the compelling evidence that it is truly an historical fact, with an at-this-moment impact on your life and mine. See you in a couple of days. Au revoir-adios-Zai Jian-Guten Nieben-Anyo.