The Man Jesus

My greatest joy since retiring has been further pursuit of God in Jesus. While this has been at the forefront of most of my life, in the years since I retired, I've had the opportunity to step away from the confines of "Christendom" and discover a wide and boundless ocean of love and goodness in God as manifested in Christ Jesus beyond that which I had ever known before.

I continue to be awestruck by this Person, Jesus of Nazareth, in ever-increasing measure! It's like opening a door into the wonder of such a person only to find another door to walk through into more of His beauty, and that door opening into another door into another and another...

A few years ago I did a series of blog posts with quotes from Albert Nolan's book, Jesus Before Christianity. This book remains one of my favorite books about Jesus. For the next few posts I will be re-looking at this book with the prayer that others will be freshly struck by how utterly human and good Jesus was in His walk on earth and why humans could not tolerate the goodness and grace of such a Man.

I remember as a young adult having a dream in which I was part of a Christian church congregation that was deliberating over Jesus, and in the end we voted against Him. That was perhaps my first peek into the antagonism between Jesus and religious systems. Nolan shows that Jesus reveals what God is really like and explains why religious and political systems of Jesus' day could not allow Him to live. It's important that we understand this in order to understand how each generation of Jesus followers faces the same realities. I hope you will be blessed by the summary of the book and encourage you to read the book for yourself.