Whether these men and women were actually brothers, sisters, cousins etc... The amazing thing is that those placed very close to Jesus in life, missed Him and who He was. That makes me, a total knucklehead, feel better that it took only 47 years for me to know who He is and I know that it is only three verses (Luke 8:19-21) but it is interesting to contemplate and reflect on the fact that we, as believers, in Jesus Christ, are His family.
Moving on to verse 22, Jesus talked the disciples into taking Him to the other side of the lake. Now, there doesn’t seem to be a purpose to the trip and Jesus went to take a nap. You know, it was a nice day for sailing, beautiful weather, hanging out with His bud’s etc... The next line says it all, using words like fierce storm, swamped and danger. These experienced sailors thought they were going to drown and they woke Jesus up to tell Him that they were in deep do-do and He responded by speaking to the wind and the waves and after they calmed down, He asked them where their faith was? They then mumbled to each other, asking who is this man that even the winds and waves obey Him?
Again, we have an example of how the people around Jesus really didn’t have a clue as to who He really was. Before He was transfigured after the resurrection, the people who hung out with Him probably sensed that He was special but maybe not God incarnate special. They saw Him heal people from a distance, raise people from the dead and teach wisdom to crowds of people but on that day in that boat, they wondered who this man is?
One of the reasons that Thomas Jefferson rejected a belief in Jesus Christ as God was because of the unspectacular nature of the apostles that followed Jesus. Jefferson said that he thought Jesus was all right, on the order of other great prophets and philosophers, but because He hung around such knuckleheads like the apostles, He couldn’t possibly be God. Jefferson rejected this idea so much, that he wrote his own account of scripture calling it the Jefferson Bible.
It is interesting to me that this famous humanist, a brave patriot and founding father of this great country, would allow the humanity of the apostles to blind him as to who Jesus was and is, while those very human qualities helped me to make my final decision towards salvation in Jesus Christ.
These obviously incomplete men who lived every day with Jesus, watching Him perform miracle after miracle, ran and hid when He was murdered. They were so frightened that they hid in a room thinking that they were going to be killed next because of their association to Him. They sent women to the grave site because they didn’t want to bring attention to themselves.
It was only after Jesus appeared to them in His resurrected body that they knew who Jesus was. After they realized, history tells us that they then became emboldened and went out to preach the gospel and watch thousands accept Christ through their testimony.
These men were all tortured to death (with the exception of John) and faced that death in a solitary and lonely manner. As they were being stoned, burned, beaten or crucified, all they would have had to say was, “stop, it was just a joke”, and their torturers would have stopped and cleaned them up and paraded them around the whole known world telling all who would listen that Jesus was not real. Historians would have recorded their testimony and the devil himself would have made sure that generation after generation would know of the testimony that came from the follower of the “false” messiah.
It is the very human nature and level of confusion as to who Jesus was, when He was with them, compared to the clarity of who He was in His resurrection, that gives us a true reflection of our faith through the lives and testimony of these men. Without their testimony and example, we would have no faith.
There is a very good set of videos on the internet that illustrate this point. The speaker is the late Dr. Gene Scott who was a legendary television preacher who had a loyal following for over twenty years. As outrageous as he could be, he did a very credible job teaching on this and other subjects. You may click on the following links to see this inspiring Easter message of salvation through Jesus Christ.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDTj-tK8MA4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HhQJfFM99o&feature=related
Happy Easter!
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