The Life That Was Revealed

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our own eyes, which we have gazed upon and touched with our own hands—this is the Word of life. And this is the life that was revealed…

Author: A first century Galilean fisherman

Some fishermen have been known to stretch a tale or two, especially when it comes to the size of their catch; but this fisherman isn’t the typical yarn spinner. He believed, to such an extant, the life which was revealed to him in the man he heard, saw and touched, that he not only held to his belief, but openly told others even when doing so meant being subjected to persecution and exile. In the end, this fisherman was exiled to an island where he was removed from the comforts of civilization and separated from the fellowship of community because he held fast to his belief in the life that had been revealed to him, Jesus Christ the Word of life.

Who was this fisherman that testified to this life that was revealed to him and why did he put his life and well-being in danger on account of the story? Could it be that there was something great about this life which had been revealed to him?

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our own eyes, which we have gazed upon and touched with our own hands—this is the Word of life. And this is the life that was revealed; we have seen it and testified to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us.

We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And this fellowship of ours is with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ. We write these things so that our joy may be complete.

And this is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you: God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with Him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin.

If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make Him out to be a liar, and His word is not in us. Excerpt from 1 John

Author: The apostle John, a fisherman and a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ

This first century fisherman was  a man named John. He was one of the twelve disciples who followed Jesus. John knew Jesus at an intimate level, having spent nearly three years with him while they traveled throughout Israel’s countryside as Jesus taught the disciples and ministered to the people, preaching to them and healing the sick and diseased among them.

Being a disciple, a pupil learning from the teachings and living example of Jesus, John heard and saw and touched Jesus, the one whom he refers to as the Word of Life. This Word of Life, as observed in the words, actions and body of Jesus, is the life that was revealed. It was revealed to all of the disciples and, yes, there was something great about this life.

As you see in the passage above, the life that was revealed to him and the other disciples was a life altogether different from anything they had known; it was eternal life. John wrote, “…this is the life that was revealed; we have seen it and testified to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us.” Jesus, whom John had heard and seen and touched, is the life that was revealed; the eternal life that was with the Father.

One can fathom that being shown eternal life would be a revelation of such magnitude that it would be life altering; especially if one also had some way of accessing that life. The good news is, not only were John and the disciples shown eternal life, but they were also shown the way of attaining eternal life. The interesting discovery is this; the way to eternal life may not be what you think.

Eternal life and the way to it were so valuable to John that he considered his own life to be of little value when compared to the privilege of proclaiming eternal life to others. In his estimation, his exile on the island of Patmos was a small price to pay for proclaiming eternal life to others so they could hear about the opportunity to have fellowship with God.

We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And this fellowship of ours is with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ.

What is the way to eternal life? In the above passage John proclaims what he and the other disciples had seen and heard. They saw Jesus. They heard Jesus. Jesus was the life that had been revealed to them, the eternal life; and they proclaimed it so we may have opportunity to join in fellowship with them, a fellowship they had with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ.

There it is! The way to eternal life! Eternal life is attained in fellowship; in fellowship with the disciples, the fellowship with them that is a fellowship with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ. So the way to eternal life is not some method or strict code of conduct or some narrowly defined belief system. Since eternal life is a person, Jesus Christ the Son, the way to him is fellowship, a relationship of knowing and being with him rather than the traversing of a path to some destination, to some level of awareness or to some destination in place or time.

John proclaimed and testified to the truth that Jesus Christ is eternal life and he clarified that the way to eternal life is fellowship with the disciples in the fellowship they share with the Father and with His Son; however, he didn’t leave it there. He went one better. He backed up his own testimony with the testimony of God.

Even if we accept human testimony, the testimony of God is greater. For this is the testimony that God has given about His Son. Whoever believes in the Son of God has this testimony within him; whoever does not believe God has made Him out to be a liar, because he has not believed in the testimony that God has given about His Son. And this is that testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.

Jesus himself had declared, “I am the way and the truth and the life.”

Fellowship with the Father and with His Son is entered into by faith when we believe in the Son of God and by the result of our faith in the Son we receive God’s own testimony that God has given us eternal life, the life in His Son.

This faith always involves the revelation of one’s own sin, the revelation that our sin spills forth from our own sinful nature. This conviction of our conscience, coupled with the revelation of who God is, results in faith given to us by God whereby we readily and willingly confess our sin. As we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness and He has the legal standing to do so because the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin.

This life that was revealed is truly amazing!

Life is in the Son.

He who has the Son has life.

Jesus Christ, the Son, is eternal life.

Therefore, he who has the Son has eternal life.

Eternal life, life, is in the Son!

Covid-19, U.S. News Headlines, The Will of Men & The Stewer’s Pot

In 2020, when the novel virus broke out in the United States, the networks flooded the news coverage with dire warnings of the fear of a potential for monumental loss of life. The numbers were strongly emphasized and regarded as indisputable, regardless of authentic medical and scientific information to the contrary. Like a rubber-stamped promo, it was force fed to society by the media, by politicians and by our health professionals.

A telling observation of the numbers is that while Covid-19 is purported to have killed roughly 300,000 in the U.S. over the first 9 months of its spread throughout the nation at an annual death rate of 400,000 per year; another killer, abortion, during its 47 years of impact on America, stilled the heart beats of vulnerable Americans at a rate in excess of four times that of Covid.

Over the 47 years since abortion was legalized in the U.S., more than 62 million people have died from abortive procedures. That is an average annual death rate of more than 1.3 million per year. And yet, little alarm is raised about the number of people dying from abortion while all alarms known to man are sounded with nearly every norm and structure of social interaction being upended by mandates leveled upon the population as governing officials pass the mandates off as being the valid and authoritative prescriptions for minimizing loss of life.

In the months that followed, the never ending siren call in the news about Covid-19 was the supposedly overwhelming, though scientifically debatable, numbers of people dying from the virus. Although the reported numbers of Covid deaths looked scary, no one could be considered to have their right mind about them and their eyes wide open if they went to great lengths in making a fuss over Covid’s numbers while saying nothing about the abortion procedures that were killing multitudes more. In that light, we know all the fuss over the Covid-19 numbers wasn’t a sincere concern. If it were, there would have been an avalanche of condemnatory hype over the number of innocent people being killed by abortion and still the reality is that for anyone to say much of anything against abortion, it would amount to the equivalence of voluntarily sticking one’s neck out beneath the wildly popular, social opinion guillotine.

Over the period of 47 years following the U.S. Supreme Court case of Roe vs. Wade, abortion has taken from our communities an average number of lives per year in excess of four times the annual average number of lives Covid-19 has taken during its scant, 9-month period of propagation. In the face of those comparative numbers, one can easily conclude…

If all the fuss over Covid-19 were really about the number of deaths, abortion would have been outlawed 46 years ago.

Furthermore, there would have been nationwide, mandated lockdowns of all abortion wards, statewide mandates rescinding the medical certification and licensing of doctors facilitating deaths by abortion, prosecutions of medical hardware manufacturers continuing to produce and sell assistive abortion equipment and the masking of Planned Parenthood’s voice by the defunding of its abortion counseling arm.

However, nothing of the sort has transpired to slow or stop abortions, so why all the hype over Covid-19? Stop and consider the numbers. An average of 1.3 million people killed each year. From Covid-19? No, from abortion. Abortion kills nearly 1 million more per year than Covid! So, ask yourself, why all the hype, why all the life changing laws and mandates over the “deadliness” of Covid-19? Why? Because there is more to this than meets the eye.

With most every event in life, big and small, there are things going on which cannot be seen by the naked eye. The Covid-19 pandemic is no different. In the backdrop behind the hype over Covid-19, the element that isn’t visible to the human eye is the will of men. Most will agree, the will of a man is a dynamic that is not readily visible the eyes, even to those boasting 20/20 vision.

There is a prophetic passage that touches on this. It speaks of the godlessness and the wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness. Men can so strongly desire the godlessness and wickedness they take part in that they do all they can to perpetuate their freedom to continue to participate in it, and in so doing, they suppress the truth by their wickedness. Their will is to hide the truth with their own wickedness. Their penchant for evil does just that with its in-your-face, over-the-top style of the flaunting of their deeds that deceptively portrays the evil as a popular notion to the society at large, thus detracting from the truth of the real evil that lies thereunder. If something is popular it has to be good, right?

So, why all the hype? The answer to that question, though invisible to the eye, is observable to those perceptive enough to discern the will of men. More pointedly, the answer can be determined if the truth that is suppressed by wickedness can be discovered. A clue to the truth that is being suppressed by the Covid-19 hype can be found by taking an overarching look at the trending headlines in the media over the past 50 years.

It is interesting to note that for a period of many years following the legalization of abortion in 1973, a central and driving narrative in the news headlines had been that of the various contingencies of the United States that had been endlessly involved in one war or another, whether those wars were against other political states or against terrorist organizations. This was the case for nearly a half a century. Then, finally, something came along that broke that narrative.

In January 2017, a president took up residency in the oval office who decidedly took action to bring an end to the warfare. In the quietness of the respite from war, the rumblings of another subject soon replaced the rumors of war that had dominated the headlines for so long. The new headlines, announcing the legal challenges to the “right” to abortion, blanketed the news outlets when individual states boldly began to pass laws banning various nuances of abortion and what do you know, all of a sudden, a virus of the magnitude of a pandemic overtook the news and pushed stories about the threats to abortion rights from front page coverage to back page blips. Coincidentally, the Covid narrative insidiously contributed to a change of election protocols that helped to potentially unseat the first president of the past 47 years who himself, by his use of executive powers and his positions on the matter, posed a serious threat to abortion rights.

The news narrative went from the nearly half a century’s coverage of endless wars to covering the threats challenging abortion rights before making a quick detour to the all-consuming coverage of a global pandemic that for a lack of knowing better, the news media would have us believe may be our undoing. An “undoing” that pales in comparison to the wickedly suppressed truth about our real undoing; that “popular”, in-your-face right of women which is carried out by the edge of the scalpel, at the suction end of the vacuum hose and at the tip of the needles our doctors are using to kill our citizens before they are given their own right to their birth from their mother’s womb for their own opportunity at a fighting chance to survive a global pandemic.

Why all the hype over Covid-19? Could it be that the hype isn’t a genuine concern over people dying from the virus; but rather, the will of men, the godlessness and wickedness of men suppressing from our headlines any mention of the substantial challenges to the rights to abortion, the monstrous killer of Americans?

A relevant proverb states, “The fear of man is a snare….” To the hapless bird, the snare presents a contraption from which maneuvering a successful escape can be executed only by overcoming insurmountable odds. When an entire nation is consumed by the fear of man, like a bird in a snare, that fear entraps them, diverting and focusing every faculty of their being from the everyday, normal happenings of life to surviving the trap, not knowing that once they fall into the fowler’s hands, the stewer’s pot is what awaits.

Truly, the reason for all the hype over Covid-19 is the will of man. The guise in the headlines persuading our citizens to fear for their lives over a pandemic that blatantly and effectively distracts from the truth of that over which legitimate and voluminous hype ought to be raised; the “lawful” killing of millions. The will of men suppressing the truth of abortion’s cost in loss of life by packing the headlines with alarms of a lesser killer that drapes us in a fog of fear as we fly headlong into its snare that is sure to entrap us so the fowler’s hand can tenderly place us in the stewer’s pot.

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness.

Romans 1:18

A Life, A Person Is Declared, Nine Months Prior To Birth

We will look at an intriguing event that was recorded thousands of years ago. This event reveals that a life, a person with a name, was given a name and the birth was foretold, nine months prior to the child’s birth. The person who recorded this account was a doctor named Luke. He wrote an orderly account following his careful investigation into the events that had transpired in earlier years, events that were handed down by those who were eyewitnesses

As you read his account, are there implications it could have on decisions you may be faced with if a pregnancy test declares a child is living in your womb?

In the time of Herod king of Judea there was a priest named Zechariah, who belonged to the priestly division of Abijah, and whose wife Elizabeth was a daughter of Aaron. Both of them were righteous in the sight of God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and decrees of the Lord. But they had no children, because Elizabeth was barren, and they were both well along in years.

One day while Zechariah’s division was on duty and he was serving as priest before God, he was chosen by lot, according to the custom of the priesthood, to enter the temple of the Lord and burn incense. And at the hour of the incense offering, the whole congregation was praying outside.

Just then an angel of the Lord appeared to Zechariah, standing at the right side of the altar of incense. When Zechariah saw him, he was startled and gripped with fear.

But the angel said to him, “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, because your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you are to give him the name John. He will be a joy and delight to you, and many will rejoice at his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He shall never take wine or strong drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother’s womb. Many of the sons of Israel he will turn back to the Lord their God. And he will go on before the Lord in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous—to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.”

“How can I be sure of this?” Zechariah asked the angel. “I am an old man, and my wife is well along in years.”

“I am Gabriel,” replied the angel. “I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news. And now you will be silent and unable to speak until the day this comes to pass, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled at their proper time.”

Meanwhile, the people were waiting for Zechariah and wondering why he took so long in the temple. When he came out and was unable to speak to them, they realized he had seen a vision in the temple. He kept making signs to them but remained speechless. And when the days of his service were complete, he returned home.

After these days, his wife Elizabeth became pregnant and for five months remained in seclusion. She declared, “The Lord has done this for me. In these days He has shown me favor and taken away my disgrace among the people.”

In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin pledged in marriage to a man named Joseph, who was of the house of David. And the virgin’s name was Mary. The angel appeared to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”

Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. So the angel told her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. Behold, you will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to give Him the name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give Him the throne of His father David, and He will reign over the house of Jacob forever. His kingdom will never end!”

“How can this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”

The angel replied, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the Holy One to be born will be called the Son of God. Look, even Elizabeth your relative has conceived a son in her old age, and she who was called barren is in her sixth month. For no word from God will ever fail.”

“I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May it happen to me according to your word.” Then the angel left her.

In those days Mary got ready and hurried to a town in the hill country of Judah, where she entered the home of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth.

When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. In a loud voice she exclaimed, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why am I so honored, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For as soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord’s word to her will be fulfilled.”

Then Mary said:

“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior!

For He has looked with favor on the humble state of His servant.

From now on all generations will call me blessed.

For the Mighty One has done great things for me.

Holy is His name.

His mercy extends to those who fear Him, from generation to generation.

He has performed mighty deeds with His arm; He has scattered those who are proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

He has brought down rulers from their thrones, but has exalted the humble.

He has filled the hungry with good things, but has sent the rich away empty.

He has helped His servant Israel, remembering to be merciful, as He promised to our fathers, to Abraham and his descendants forever.”

Mary stayed with Elizabeth for about three months and then returned home.

When the time came for Elizabeth to have her child, she gave birth to a son.