Put your thinking caps on. This time of year is good to think about last year and next year. Our thoughts may make a significant impact for next year as well as the rest of our lives.
Before there was anything, a person had a plan to create everything including time, because there was not even time before everything was created. That’s difficult for us to comprehend.
This week Christians will celebrate the birth of Jesus. We love the stories surrounding His birth in Bethlehem more than 2,000 years ago. Who wouldn’t? Glorious choirs of angels singing to shepherds guarding sheep at night, and wise men following a moving star to a king’s palace seeking God’s anointed One promised hundreds of years before in sacred texts. Exciting times!
All of that and much, much more was in the person’s plan before anything existed. The Bible tells us about this in the first few verses of John’s Gospel in which John identifies Jesus Himself as the person with the plan Who made it all happen. John tells us Jesus is the Creator Who stepped into His own creation as a man. That was a pivotal part of the plan before anything was created.
Can we imagine all the details that must have gone into that event? It was a big deal then, and we celebrate it today as Christmas. Before time, Jesus planned His own birth, life, death to pay for our sins, resurrection to give us life, and ascension far above and beyond anything His creation could ever imagine.
Jesus’ plan is about all of creation, not just the human race. From a human perspective, we began with a terminal response to Jesus’ plan. Adam’s choice doomed us, even all of creation to futility and death. Yet, Adam’s choice was part of Jesus’ plan.
How much more superior is Jesus the Creator to His creatures? Without Jesus there would be no life, no thing. Jesus’ superiority cannot be measured in any way. Nevertheless, each one of us is prone to compare our thoughts and reasons with gods of our own imaginations, and we believe we are always superior.
Jesus carried out the central focus of His plan over a period of roughly 33 years. We are approaching the two-thousandth anniversary of that part of His plan. For thousands of years Jesus had told prophets exactly what was going to happen and when it would happen. That was more than a sign: It was a celestial billboard!
In a new study released by Pew Research, 55% of all Americans believe Jesus Christ is going to return to earth one day. Nearly 40% of those surveyed believe “we are living in the End Times.” The study did not ask responders why they believed these two questions.
What do we do? We do a lot of things, but we don’t do what we obviously should do if Jesus is our Creator and Almighty God. Christmas 2022 is only a few days away. Could we do something this year to commemorate Jesus’ plan? Might we consider how He has included each of us into His plan?
“He who testifies to these things says, ‘Yes, I am coming quickly.’ Amen. Come, Lord Jesus. The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all. Amen.”
Daniel L. Gardner is a syndicated columnist who lives in Starkville, MS. You may contact him at PJandMe2@gmail.com.
1 comment:
God created each of us as an individual with free will, responsibility and a capacity for developing skills and intelligence, creatively. We honor God when we create products, services, government and art which empowers individuals, not group think.
Our Constitution and the liberty it enforces is a recitation of God's gifts to each American at conception. Merry Christmas to y'all and Happy Birthday to Jesus.
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