In the Old Testament God, through His dealings with special individuals and His prophets, pointed to the coming of Jesus-Christ, whom He first promised to Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. His coming was detailed and emphasised by Malachie, the last prophet of the Old Testament, four centuries before His coming; he wrote: ‘For you who revere my name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healings in his wings. And you will go out and leap like calves released from the stall.’ (Malachi 4: 2) A very fitting end to the Old Testament, then in the New Testament, God bears witness to it by revealing how Jesus came and why He came. We shall look into it, to bring to light the reason of His sacrificial death, and how through His glorious resurrection, God brings to completion His plan of redemption. What I wrote in the previous ‘Links’ was to bring us to realise, that from the very beginning of Genesis to the end of Revelation, God, in His great wisdom, works everything according to a preconceived plan which He brought into being before the world began!

Through Jesus Christ, God, the Father, decided to bring the world out of the chaos caused by sin, and to usher it back into the perfection that all his creation knew before Satan’s rebellion culminating in the creation of a new heaven and a new earth. As I have already said, how to eradicate sin and evil, was God’s greatest problem, and now that we consider it in detail, as revealed in the New Testament, we realise how wise, perfect, and mighty the end is going to be. It is the greatest love story the world has ever known, as it is stated: ‘For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whosoever believes in Him (whether Jew or Gentile) 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 Son. This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone that loves evil hates the light and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. 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.’ (John 3: 16: 21) We discover in the ministry of Jesus His Son, how careful He was to faithfully deliver the words His Father gave Him, and attributed them to Him, as the source of everything He said. Christ’s devotion and obedience in delivering the Gospel just as God told Him to, is exemplary, and should inspire every preacher to do it as seriously as did Jesus, our Lord and Master!

Jesus came to earth willingly, the one and only thing that made Him come is His love, for His Father firstly and then for all those that He gave to Him before the foundation of the earth! (Ephesians 1: 3-6) The apostle John said that ‘God is love’ so is His Son, JESUS.  I have spent a lot of time not to try to show from Holy Scriptures, that Jesus is Lord, the Bible does not try to prove it either, I just states the facts concerning Him as I find them written, one believes that He is who says He is, or one does not; so, what I wrote about Jesus was to show why we should believe that He is Lord; not the kind of Lord we have on earth, but Lord meaning ‘Jehovah’ or ‘Yahweh’, as He said He was. It is written: ‘My Father, whom you claim as your God, is the one who glorifies me. Though you do not know Him, I know Him. If I said I did not, I would be a liar like you, but I know Him and keep His word. Your father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day; he saw it and was glad. You are not yet fifty years old, the Jews said to Him, and you have seen Abraham!

I tell you the truth, Jesus answered, before Abraham was born, I AM! At this they picked up stones to stone Him, but Jesus hid himself, slipping away from the Temple grounds. (John 8: 54-59) 

Jesus, from His birth upset the Jewish authority. Firstly, when the Magi came from the east to Jerusalem and asked where the King of the Jews was, for they came to worship Him, when it got to the ears of King Herod, he was very disturbed and all Jerusalem with Him! Later, when He started His ministry and preached the Gospel in the temple the synagogues and the countryside of His country, they started to hate Him, seeking to find a reason to kill Him; eventually they crucified Him, ignorant that they fulfilled the will of God. (Acts 2: 22-24)