Last month, the youths had a combined meeting with several other B-P churches with the theme – Consider Christ, and I am sure many of you can recall the dramatic presentation on the death and resurrection of Christ that they reproduced at Communion Sunday two weeks ago. During the combined meeting, each group was taken back in time and transformed into the group of disciples who followed Jesus and were closest to Him during His earthly ministry. Each game station was organised to walk them through the life of Jesus as it might have been had they lived in His midst, witnessing His miracles, His teachings, His triumphal entry, and finally His humiliation and crucifixion. The aim of this whole theme was to help remind the youths afresh of the person who was Christ – God Himself walking on earth as a man, and the incomprehensible work that He accomplished when He obeyed the will of the Father by being made willing to suffer and die undeservingly on the cross. Oftentimes when meditating on Christ and what He has done for us, especially in preparation to partake of the Holy Communion, what is the picture that comes to mind?
Christ the Contradiction
If you were to have met and interacted with Jesus in person while He was on earth, have you ever wondered what aspect of Him would strike you the hardest? What would it have been really like to follow multitudes upon multitudes to hear Him speak words of faith and conviction, and witness miracles performed before your very eyes? Or how it might have felt if perhaps you were one of the despised of society with whom He bothered to sit down to have a meal with, or one of the disciples whose dusty feet our Lord knelt over to wash and make clean? Jesus was able to identify with those He came into contact with, with such penetrating intimacy. Yet He was also radically different from the rest of the religious teachers of His day with His authoritative claims to be God, and words and actions to back His assertions. Would it have been Christ’s meekness or majesty that drew crowds to Him? His manhood or deity? Or the explosive fusion of the “perfect harmony the Man who is God”, as the familiar song goes… Such is the apparent contradiction of Christ because there is no other, and never will be any like Him who is fully God and fully man in essence and being. In Philippians 2, this is the Christ “Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men.”
Christ the Covenant
Not only was Christ an enigma when He entered this world in the form of a human, but He also had a larger purpose to accomplish through His suffering, death and resurrection that even Peter, one of His disciples who were closest to Him and were probably His most trusted, could not understand and tried to oppose unwittingly, earning His harsh admonishment of “Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me” (Matthew 16:23). Christ Jesus came, not only to reach out to His creation and demonstrate His power, but more importantly to accomplish and fulfil the Old Covenant of ritual and sacrifice by becoming the Mediator of a better covenant – the New Covenant of grace. What does that mean to us as Christians today? It means that our status before God has changed completely, and we now stand worthy to claim the awesome privilege of a direct, intimate relationship with Him. The insatiable wrath of God that threatened to consume us has been appeased once and for all, and we no longer have to contend with meeting the unattainable, absolute standard of the Mosaic Law…
Cost of Christ Crucified
The penalty has been taken. We crucified Jesus with our sins – for such was the heavy price to be paid so that a beautiful new chapter could be written in God’s salvation plan for you and me. However the question is, are we short-changing ourselves by still choosing to go down the old road that the Pharisees continued to blindly and stubbornly follow instead of seeing the new path the Christ has laid down for us with His precious blood? We often picture the Pharisees as the obvious “bad guys” in opposition to Jesus. But actually, their good intentions of desiring to please God and obey Him are often overlooked. Their intended end point was the same, but they were totally wrong and misguided in their method of getting there. They were sincere, no doubt about it. But they were sincerely wrong. Now how does that relate to us? Simply this: God will not fault us for our sincere desire to please and honour Him, but the crucial point that Jesus tried to bring across time and again in His encounters with the Pharisees was that the means of reaching God is just as important as the end, or Christ’s death would be for naught. Service and sacrifice are part of Christian living, but that should follow a living, breathing relationship with Christ or we would stand just as guilty as the Pharisees before God when we meet Him face to face one day; guilty of rejecting Christ as the Mediator of the New Covenant. So, let us resolve like Mary to, “choose that good part, which shall not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:42), and choose to sit and listen at our Master’s feet.
Christ the Contradiction
If you were to have met and interacted with Jesus in person while He was on earth, have you ever wondered what aspect of Him would strike you the hardest? What would it have been really like to follow multitudes upon multitudes to hear Him speak words of faith and conviction, and witness miracles performed before your very eyes? Or how it might have felt if perhaps you were one of the despised of society with whom He bothered to sit down to have a meal with, or one of the disciples whose dusty feet our Lord knelt over to wash and make clean? Jesus was able to identify with those He came into contact with, with such penetrating intimacy. Yet He was also radically different from the rest of the religious teachers of His day with His authoritative claims to be God, and words and actions to back His assertions. Would it have been Christ’s meekness or majesty that drew crowds to Him? His manhood or deity? Or the explosive fusion of the “perfect harmony the Man who is God”, as the familiar song goes… Such is the apparent contradiction of Christ because there is no other, and never will be any like Him who is fully God and fully man in essence and being. In Philippians 2, this is the Christ “Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men.”
Christ the Covenant
Not only was Christ an enigma when He entered this world in the form of a human, but He also had a larger purpose to accomplish through His suffering, death and resurrection that even Peter, one of His disciples who were closest to Him and were probably His most trusted, could not understand and tried to oppose unwittingly, earning His harsh admonishment of “Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me” (Matthew 16:23). Christ Jesus came, not only to reach out to His creation and demonstrate His power, but more importantly to accomplish and fulfil the Old Covenant of ritual and sacrifice by becoming the Mediator of a better covenant – the New Covenant of grace. What does that mean to us as Christians today? It means that our status before God has changed completely, and we now stand worthy to claim the awesome privilege of a direct, intimate relationship with Him. The insatiable wrath of God that threatened to consume us has been appeased once and for all, and we no longer have to contend with meeting the unattainable, absolute standard of the Mosaic Law…
Cost of Christ Crucified
The penalty has been taken. We crucified Jesus with our sins – for such was the heavy price to be paid so that a beautiful new chapter could be written in God’s salvation plan for you and me. However the question is, are we short-changing ourselves by still choosing to go down the old road that the Pharisees continued to blindly and stubbornly follow instead of seeing the new path the Christ has laid down for us with His precious blood? We often picture the Pharisees as the obvious “bad guys” in opposition to Jesus. But actually, their good intentions of desiring to please God and obey Him are often overlooked. Their intended end point was the same, but they were totally wrong and misguided in their method of getting there. They were sincere, no doubt about it. But they were sincerely wrong. Now how does that relate to us? Simply this: God will not fault us for our sincere desire to please and honour Him, but the crucial point that Jesus tried to bring across time and again in His encounters with the Pharisees was that the means of reaching God is just as important as the end, or Christ’s death would be for naught. Service and sacrifice are part of Christian living, but that should follow a living, breathing relationship with Christ or we would stand just as guilty as the Pharisees before God when we meet Him face to face one day; guilty of rejecting Christ as the Mediator of the New Covenant. So, let us resolve like Mary to, “choose that good part, which shall not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:42), and choose to sit and listen at our Master’s feet.
