They were astonished beyond measure...
Illustration
"... They were astonished beyond measure." As seen from our human perspective, they should have been: never before had there been anybody like Jesus. But from the divine perspective, they might well have expected something different: after all, God was moving in, coming onto the scene.
Driving along the highway, you abruptly come upon a disarrangement of the road. The pavement is torn up, the berms are strewn with strange paraphernalia, big machines are doing unusual things. You are required to slow down and give careful attention to things you normally do not see along the road. The explanation for all this unusual activity is printed in large letters on a big yellow sign: "Men Working."
We traverse the span of history, travel the highways of time; we observe the norms of human life, the almost predictable routines, repeated sequences of cause and effect; we observe the generations passing, babies being born and people dying, events moving in their wide-sweeping cycles. Then, suddenly, from about 4 B.C. until about 29 A.D., there appears a break in the normal, a deviation from the usual. The routines were disrupted; there is an unprecedented kind of birth, a different kind of life, a death unlike any ever seen before. And if we look carefully we see the signal flag, a sign cameo-clear, and the words say: "God Working."
When God moves in, as we are convinced he did in Christ, we might well expect things to be so different they are hard for us to understand.
-- Mann
Driving along the highway, you abruptly come upon a disarrangement of the road. The pavement is torn up, the berms are strewn with strange paraphernalia, big machines are doing unusual things. You are required to slow down and give careful attention to things you normally do not see along the road. The explanation for all this unusual activity is printed in large letters on a big yellow sign: "Men Working."
We traverse the span of history, travel the highways of time; we observe the norms of human life, the almost predictable routines, repeated sequences of cause and effect; we observe the generations passing, babies being born and people dying, events moving in their wide-sweeping cycles. Then, suddenly, from about 4 B.C. until about 29 A.D., there appears a break in the normal, a deviation from the usual. The routines were disrupted; there is an unprecedented kind of birth, a different kind of life, a death unlike any ever seen before. And if we look carefully we see the signal flag, a sign cameo-clear, and the words say: "God Working."
When God moves in, as we are convinced he did in Christ, we might well expect things to be so different they are hard for us to understand.
-- Mann
