The Greatest True Story Ever Told !

Joe Joson 
December 2012 /  First Published 2011
California 


Christmas is just around the corner!  The best season of the year is in full swing! Almost!  Christmas carols are filling the air.  And a lot of us are starting to get wide eyed in anticipation! The joys of Christmas are with us..once again.

Kids and young adults are eagerly awaiting their  presents . Adults and for that matter everyone,  look forward to seeing old friends , visiting families, eating all that great and memory-inducing  ‘Christmasy’ food , singing or listening to Christmas songs of old , telling stories and just about anything we do during this joyous part of the year! 

Then we look back to the Christmases of yesteryears.  Our  Christmas as kids , as young adults.  Memories of Christmas are awesome .  Why is this so, I often wondered.  Why is Christmas such a wonderful celebration that Christians the world over and even non-Christians love to participate in? Christmas to me is ‘tons’ more exciting and ‘magical’ than hundreds of Disneyland visits put together. Christmas brings down cultural divisions, even in many places, Christmas renders religious barriers nil.

Most of us know who we are celebrating this season for.  It is the birth of this Man we call Jesus who walked the earth over two thousand years ago.  His coming to the world , transformed humans, societies , cultures , nations,  the world over.  Not a single human in the history of mankind comes close to how His coming to earth made and continue to make such transformations. He continues to transform nations, homes, individuals. How and why is this so?

As we reflect on the life of Jesus and how He established a following never before achieved by any human being, we are awed , inspired and attracted to His story. We love His story. We soak up His story. And we celebrate His story!

His story goes back at least a thousand years before He walked the earth. From the very early Jewish people who discovered the Living God of Abraham , Isaac and Jacob on down to the Prophets who were inspired by God to write and prophesy all about Him hundreds of years before His coming to earth and then about His eventual coming.

The Prophets wrote about Him , the Messiah,  hundreds of years before He came , and prophesied many things that would happen to Him. As His life unfolded before the very eyes of His disciples, most of the people surrounding Him did not have a clue that He was fulfilling many things prophesied by the Prophets about Him. The very people who were experts of the Law of Moses totally missed who He was and went as far as having Him killed … as planned by The Father. Wow… I thought , what ‘madness’!  Little did I know or understand the mysteries and power of ‘humility’ and love coming from this God turned Man! His love for man, His humility that allowed Him to step down from the position of God to that of a human,  had the power to transform hearts, lives and souls of millions of human beings! 

Napoleon Bonaparte, the great French general who went to conquer many nations reflected later in his time of defeat and isolation,  about this ‘Man they called Jesus’.  He wondered that he did not have a single follower left following him. He wondered out loud that while he used force and weapons to put down humans and nations to make them follow him, he was awed that ‘This Jesus’ never lifted a sword….. and yet He had millions following Him.  Napoleon was awed. We are still awed by His power to transform, to attract , to love.

So Jesus came to this world in the most humble conditions as a baby and later as an adult. Many prophecies continued to be fulfilled about Him. The experts of the Law or the Pharisees and His disciples continued to miss these fulfillments of prophecies.  Then He openly claimed to be God! This was too much for the Pharisees. They thought he was out of His mind. They accused Him of blasphemy. They wanted Him dead.

Then He started to perform His great feats no man on earth has ever done and witnessed. He performed miracles.  He made the best wine out of water during a wedding!  He fed thousands from five loaves of bread and two fish! He raised several people from the dead! Lazarus was four days in his grave when Jesus called him out and he came out still wrapped in his burial ‘attire’!  He healed hundreds if not thousands of folks from all kinds of diseases! The dreaded leprosy that eats at your flesh was no exception!  He healed ten lepers simultaneously. He healed from a distance without seeing or touching the sick. He walked on water! He calmed stormy seas!  And His disciples thought, ‘Who is this man , that even the seas obey Him?’

Then at one time, before the very eyes of his disciples Peter , James and John He displayed the most awesome display ever witnessed by humans!  He transfigured from the flesh and blood to the ‘ heavenly energy’ , spiritual and glorified ‘Being’ that He was ! His disciples’ descriptions: “ His clothes became dazzling white, whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them.”  Mark.   ^“2 There he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light.” Matthew.  “²⁹ As he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightning.” Luke. 

Wow! For most of us , that is a tough bit of information to chew on! But wait, He was not done yet!  Then it happened. The unthinkable happened. As He Himself told His disciples three times early on, he was killed and then He  rose from the dead three days later!  And Isaiah The Prophet prophesied about these events more than seven hundred years before Jesus walked the earth,  down to the smallest detail . Look up your Old Testaments and get excited!  Under the power and inspiration of the Holy Spirit,  your  Old and New Testaments were written by men whose lives were separated by hundreds of years,  by hundreds if not thousands of miles and they did not know each other!  And yet this greatest story, came together and pointed to this One Man , Jesus Christ!  And He proved to all who He said He was. He fulfilled what were written about Him one at a time! The odds according to mathematicians of one man following this feat , the number of prophecies and their fulfillment , is staggering. It is a tremendous number.

No one saw this greatest event , His resurrection,  as it unfurled . But one can imagine the un-Earthly powers that raised  Him from the dead. The Scriptures tell us that no other than The Holy Spirit did all this. Brilliant light emanating from and throughout His body , a repeat of that day when He transfigured on the mountain before His three shocked and petrified disciples. They were so terrified that Peter mumbled and blurted out a few words about building three shelters for Jesus and His two heavenly visitors!  If you have not heard of the Shroud of Turin, dig up this story. Scientists are baffled , some are convinced.  The Shroud for all scientific purposes appear to have been ‘subjected to some sort of radioactive energy’ that caused the image to be imposed on the material.

The transfigured Jesus then, the resurrected Jesus this time! And I thought why not!  If we can imagine  the power that got the ‘big bang’ on its way and hurtled all these seen matter from ‘nothing’…. And today we witness an ever-expanding-with-no-seen-end physical universe so vast that it would take more than our science, yes , nothing short of a fully functioning faith, to even begin to understand or ‘see’ what makes a 13-billion-lightyear-wide universe tick. And how can we even begin to comprehend the spirit world if we have no clue about this vast physical world? I have given up long ago to try to figure it out. I just enjoy the ride. I just enjoy Christmases.  I leave it up to the Master. He knows best!  He said, ‘Be still and know that I AM God!’

After His resurrection, He walked the earth forty days with His disciples appearing and re-appearing before them, eating fish with them, showing them his wounds, asking them to touch these wounds to erase their doubts that indeed it was Him and not a ghost.

Jesus had a great sense of humor I thought.  He walked in on His disciples at least twice when they were in great earnest and fear, hiding behind closed doors and away from the awful Pharisees who had their Master killed.  Jesus appeared before them without knocking on the huge locked doors or anyone letting Him in and then declares: ‘Peace be with you!’  And that is after seeing Him crucified and buried!  Small wonder they were all startled and petrified.

As we had a doubting Thomas who flatly told everyone that he would not believe until he saw Jesus himself and touched his wounds, there are a lot of us  who remain ‘unconvinced’.  There remain in many hearts lots of doubts. After all, the unbelievers of old could not find the body. They had the greatest issue and mystery of Jesus’ empty tomb. The unbelievers looked, they could not find Him. The tomb was empty and His body was nowhere to be found.  He showed Himself only to His followers as He also told them before His death that He would.  It seems God wants us to see Him not so much from the human ability to see but from our other ability to see… with faith.  

God has given us this yet another mystery… faith. Believing without seeing or not having any material things to grapple with for evidence.  Paul described faith this way:  ‘Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ And we all say, What?!!!!

All his disciples including Mathias who was a replacement for Judas Iscariot, all chose to die violent deaths, with the exception of John, rather than deny that Jesus Christ resurrected. And men, honorable or not , do not normally die for a lie!  They die for something they truly believe in. They have seen the risen Jesus after He was killed and they were no longer fearful of death!  John , was spared and lived to write the last book of the New Testament, Revelation. Revelation , a tough book to read and understand for a lot of us, tells us of end times but end times only in terms of the worldly experience. This book talks about a New Earth that is no longer part of this physical Earth!

This greatest story has no end. It continues on forever.  It exists in the here and now and it will exist in a place and time that has no end.  Eternity cannot be grasped using intellect, knowledge, logic, reason , science. Eternity cannot be quantified using the most advanced mathematical equations!  Eternity, this great existence in the spirit and glorified world is outside the realms of nature , beyond the reaches of human efforts to understand, not within the clutches of science.  But God in His ever flowing show of mysteries and wonders to us, gave us more than a small peek of who He is, what a wonderful world He exists in and how we may be there one day with Him! He sent Jesus to give us a bigger picture of His Kingdom and how to get there.  And Faith is our spiritual eyes. Faith infinitely takes us to places long after reason, logic and science have stopped dead in their tracks!

He has also equipped us with a spirit that ‘hardwires’ us to Him The Maker, the Ultimate Spirit. As we pray, the best of all two-way communications or ‘network’ hums into gear,  full of ‘heavenly energy’.  Spirits connecting. Spirits sending and receiving ‘data’ from the physical world to the spririt world and back. Gloriously awesome!   And Jesus told His disciples that as they abide in Him, the Spirit will LIVE in them.  The Network , the Source of all sources resides in us if we allow it to. Our choice, He waits. He has given us the will to choose. He has all eternity to wait. We don’t.   Is this not such an awesome deal? I say it is!

So, I do not know about you but this Christmas, I sit way past Christmas presents. I look forward to the best of all Christmas presents.  The best in all ‘retirements’. Life in Eternity with the Creator of the universe and the Creator who created me is the greatest of all destinations!  I do not cease to get super excited to know , to experience , to play an active  part in and to live in living color this greatest story ever told as it continues to unfold before me. The greatest story that will never end is real. We  are all part of this true story no matter what side of the fence we sit on.   It is an awesome discovery.  It is the best present ever.  It is truly the greatest true story ever told!  

^“17 Command those who are rich in this present age not to be haughty, nor to trust in uncertain riches but in the living God, who gives us richly all things to enjoy. ¹⁸ Let them do good, that they be rich in good works, ready to give, willing to share, ¹⁹ storing up for themselves a good foundation for the time to come, that they may lay hold on eternal life.”  1 Timothy 6:17-19 New King James Version.

Now, doesn’t  the verse above give us a clear message on what to do for Christmas and… beyond ? 

Merry Christmas to all!

Joe, Ofelia, Joey,  Luke-Chelsea & Baby Leia and Justin

Catanduanes, Philippines/California , USA