Blog

by Charlie Wolcott

I have been praying about what to write about as the year comes to a close, as well as what to do for next year. With Christmas approaching, many preachers begin to focus on the birth of Christ, and that’s never a bad idea, but I want to do something more than that. I post a devotional every morning on Facebook, and I am currently in the Psalms, but I sensed I needed to do something more than that, and I am drawn to write and study about Jesus.

We live in a time and culture where we are searching for many solutions to the madness of what is going on, and it seems we are turning to every answer in the book except the only one that works. The election recently happened in the United States, and the people have spoken up that they are done with all this woke ideology, DEI, and gender abuse and decisively elected President Trump back into office after four years of seeing the left’s true side. I want to make this clear: even though I did vote for Trump because I knew what having Harris in office would mean, Trump is NOT the savior of the U.S. While God may indeed use him, the only savior of the United States (and the rest of the world) is Jesus. Only when BOTH the people and those whom we chose to represent us turn to Christ can there be peace once again in this land.

But we live in a church culture in which only 6% of professing believers have any working knowledge or belief about Jesus and who He actually is. They say His name, but they certainly do not believe who Jesus said He is, what He actually did, what He calls for, and what it means to follow Him. And how can we follow someone we don’t know? Sadly, what most people do is create an image of God in their minds that is simply a reflection of themselves, and it’s themselves they follow and worship, not God.

So, who is Jesus? What did He do? What motivated Him? What drove His statements? How did people respond to Him? These are all things I want to explore in greater detail than I have before. I don’t want this to be a mere academic study either. A few years ago, I wrote a series about prayer, and the one thing that has driven me nuts about it is how much I struggle with actually implementing these truths into practice. I want this study to be a time when both you, my reader, and I can truly get closer to Jesus and learn to know Him better and how to love Him better. Then, we learn how to obey Him better.

What I plan to do in this study is run through all four Gospels simultaneously. I know there are chronological Bibles that put things in order, and I know that there are times when a Gospel writer will insert an event into another event that is not in chronological order to make a point. In Mark, scholars call this a “Markian Sandwich.” I am not necessarily going to hit every teaching, every parable, or every miracle, but I do want to take these “snapshots” of Jesus’ life and look at the person of Jesus and his interactions with both man and God. In some cases, I’ll combine passages, and for others, I’ll emphasize other things. It certainly will not be a comprehensive study.

So to set the stage, everything in the Bible and all of world history is centered around and focused on the life of Jesus. God created the heavens and the earth to be a platform and stage for this epic drama piece we call the Gospel. He created mankind to be like Him, made in God’s image, to be reflections of Him, and yet man chose to rebel against God and do his own thing. God brought down both judgment in the form of punishment for sin but also mercy. This is so that man would not go to Hell immediately, but also that man would not live in his sin forever. He made a declaration that a Savior would come.

The history of the Bible is about God’s dealings with man but also with an emphasis on showcasing the utter depravity of sin. These snapshots of Jesus – who He would be, what He would be like, how He would be born, how He would live, how He would die, what He would overcome, and what offices He would hold – showcase that Jesus truly is everything that we could ever need.

After giving over 300 prophecies and then being silent for 400 years, the time had come. God waited for the prophecies of Daniel and the four major empires to come, and the one in which there would be peace among many nations through the Roman Empire was now in place. The throne of Judah had been abolished, the Temple was back up, Rome occupied Judea, and Rome had just invented one of the cruelest forms of capital punishment: crucifixion. Everything was in place. All that was left was to be sure a man of royal heritage but humble living and a woman also of royal bloodline but likewise of humble living would be together and be of the right heart to have one of the greatest privileges any human being could have had: to be the parents of Jesus Christ. Our analysis of Jesus will start next week with the announcement of His arrival.

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