From beginning to end the...
Illustration
From beginning to end the Bible is proclaiming one undergirding truth -- God entered upon the scene of human affairs; God deals with people as an individual and as nations. The Deists affirm, "God is an absentee God watching the world go by." On the contrary, God is in the world. The Judaeo-Christian God is one who has entered history.
Pagan faiths like those of Greece and Rome describe the gods in shadowy mythological realms, that never were on land or sea.
Peter speaks of what he saw and heard, especially on that Mount of Transfiguration where he beheld Jesus the village carpenter, suddenly trafficking with the heavenly places. Peter saw Jesus crucified upon a hill; saw him die and be buried in the good earth. Furthermore, he spoke face to face with that same Jesus, risen from the dead.
The visitor to Athens wanders among the sad magnificent ruins of the Parthenon and imagines what it must have looked like. One chaste little chapel seems to have been preserved in tact. The Shrine of Diana. Here tradition asserts Diana descended on the hill from heaven. But educated Greeks, not least Socrates, did not really believe that as they would believe in Pericles. This was mythology; and the idea kept their faith alive.
But the visitor to Jerusalem will gaze up at a rugged escarpment, which might look like a human skull, and know as an historical fact, recorded in the annals of that same pagan Rome, that Jesus died on a cross there. And there is a garden and an upper room where the risen Christ spoke to his disciples.
-- Docherty
Pagan faiths like those of Greece and Rome describe the gods in shadowy mythological realms, that never were on land or sea.
Peter speaks of what he saw and heard, especially on that Mount of Transfiguration where he beheld Jesus the village carpenter, suddenly trafficking with the heavenly places. Peter saw Jesus crucified upon a hill; saw him die and be buried in the good earth. Furthermore, he spoke face to face with that same Jesus, risen from the dead.
The visitor to Athens wanders among the sad magnificent ruins of the Parthenon and imagines what it must have looked like. One chaste little chapel seems to have been preserved in tact. The Shrine of Diana. Here tradition asserts Diana descended on the hill from heaven. But educated Greeks, not least Socrates, did not really believe that as they would believe in Pericles. This was mythology; and the idea kept their faith alive.
But the visitor to Jerusalem will gaze up at a rugged escarpment, which might look like a human skull, and know as an historical fact, recorded in the annals of that same pagan Rome, that Jesus died on a cross there. And there is a garden and an upper room where the risen Christ spoke to his disciples.
-- Docherty
