Archives: Emanuel

Tony and Peter are visitors and very close friends of Paul who has been sentenced to six months imprisonment for smuggling Bibles and witnessing to his Christian faith in Tel Aviv. The three of them see each other once a month, and inevitably their talk reverts to the topic that is very dear to them - Christianity and the state of the world.

The Conversation

Tony: Why do you think Jesus Christ chose to come into the world when he did, rather than today when, with modern technology and telecommunications, it would be much easier to spread His message to the four corners of the earth?

Peter: Emmanuel is the name the angel gave Jesus before Mary conceived Him. Matthew 1:23 says: "Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel," which means, "God is with us." The Scriptures talk about a virgin conceiving and bearing a son, whom they shall name Emmanuel. That was in the days of Emperor Augustus, and virgin girls before marriage were the norm rather the exception, as in our day. I guess that was one of the reasons God chose to have His Son incarnate then, rather than any other time.

Tony: Come on now, Peter! Doesn’t the Bible say, “Do not presume to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our ancestor'; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. [Mat 3:9] If we believe that the Bible is the Word of God, then God is able, from these stones, to raise up virgin girls ‘to Abraham’ as well.

Peter: Yes, but I said that mainly to stress one factor in our culture - “sexual freedom”. Naturally, there are many other factors, like intellectual decadence, lack of discernment, apathy, and indifference. Can you visualize Jesus preaching the Gospel today on the streets of Jerusalem, New York, San Francisco, Paris, London, Rome, Tokyo, Moscow, or Beijing - what would happen to Him? At least He would get Himself arrested and put in jail, or laughed at, or ignored, if not killed outright [for the second time].

Tony: But Jesus would not need to go preaching the Good News on the streets. Wouldn’t you think that He would use the mass media, especially radio and television, as some popular evangelical preachers like Billy Graham do nowadays?

Paul: That sounds plausible to the shallow-minded, but the fact is that the Lord chose to come at that particular time because that was the right time to do it. I say the right time because there was no other time better than the time chosen by God for His beloved, and only Son, to come among us.

He chose a particular place, Palestine, because Jesus is descended from the house of Judah, and it was the Promised Land where David, His ancestor, established his kingdom, after Saul, who descended from the tribe of Benjamin, was rejected as king of Israel.

“For rebellion is no less a sin than divination, and stubbornness is like iniquity and idolatry. Because you have rejected the word of the LORD, he has also rejected you from being king." [1 Sam 15:23]

Also Palestine was the land of the Jewish religion, for in Acts 10:39 is written: And we are witnesses of all things which he did both in the land of the Jews, and in Jerusalem; whom they slew and hanged on a tree”. [From the King James Version]

Also in John 4:22 says: “You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.

The Lord Jesus started spreading his message of the Kingdom of God with only twelve disciples, and then added another seventy-two, who left him for good, soon after. In John 6:66 is written, “Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.”

Not long after Jesus ascended to His Father, many others joined them, as we read in Acts 2:41: “So those who welcomed his message were baptized, and that day about three thousand persons were added.” [See also Act 2: 47; 4:4; 5:14; 6:1-7; 9:31; 11:21-24; 16:5].

According to the Acts of the Apostles, which is the record of the early Church, the number of people who joined the first believers in Christ grew daily and soon, after Saul’s conversion, the Church spread all over the Roman Empire. From twelve men at the beginning to thousands, if not millions of Christians within a few decades, for the Gospel was preached to everyone, man, women, Jews, non-Jews, Gentile and Barbarian alike, without the help of any modern telecommunications we have today.

God shows us that He doesn’t need man’s modern technology to spread his Word. That is so we won’t think that it is by our power, rather than by the power of His Word.

What the Bible says about putting our trust in man or in things rather than in Him.

“How long the Most High has been patient with those who inhabit the world! - and not for their sake, but because of the times that he has foreordained." [2 Esd 7:74]

“Therefore shall the strength of Pharaoh be your shame, and the trust in the shadow of Egypt your confusion.” [Isa 30:3]

“And the number of them that lapped, putting their hand to their mouth, were three hundred men: but all the rest of the people bowed down upon their knees to drink water. And the Lord said unto Gideon, By the three hundred men that lapped will I save you, and deliver the Midianites into thine hand: and let all the other people go every man unto his place.” [Judg 7:6-7]

“And David said to Joab and to the rulers of the people, Go, number Israel from Beersheba even to Dan; and bring the number of them to me, that I may know it. And Joab answered, The Lord make his people an hundred times so many more as they be: but, my lord the king, are they not all my lord's servants? Why then doth my lord require this thing? Why will he be a cause of trespass to Israel? [1 Chr 21:2-3]

“And Joab gave up the sum of the number of the people unto the king: and there were in Israel eight hundred thousand valiant men that drew the sword; and the men of Judah were five hundred thousand men. And David's heart smote him after that he had numbered the people. And David said unto the Lord, I have sinned greatly in that I have done: and now, I beseech thee, O Lord, take away the iniquity of thy servant; for I have done very foolishly.”

Finally in Jer 17:5: “Thus says the LORD: Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the LORD.”

Billy Graham might think he is great, because he has millions of followers, but he is not changing the world, is he? I do not really see many great changes from that quarter. If anything, we might see a lot of money in aid going to assist Israel in its increasing slaughter of Palestinians, among other evil things.

Today we have arrived at a dead end. As for the Christianity that we knew, we are now reading its final chapter. The paradox is that people think that, because we have acquired so much through new discoveries and technologies, and have become more affluent comfortable, and clever in some aspects of life that we are more advanced and better informed.

Peter: From the historical point of view in the last millennium, a popular belief is that the Copernican Revolution and the inquisition of Galileo are things of the past. Human societies, it is claimed, have progressed beyond the stage where such outrages could happen again. We have proof though that the Copernican Revolution is far from over, and that society has not improved since the sixteenth century in any important respect. In fact the situation may have got worse, with the successes of the Industrial Revolution conferring upon human beings a degree of arrogance not seen before. The thinking has shifted from an Earth-centred Universe to the equally unlikely idea that life - that most complex and amazingly intricate phenomenon in the entire cosmos - must be centred on man. It is science which decides what life is. The new dogma has Judeo and Christian roots, but today its custodians are scientists rather than the high priests of the church".

Paul: Thanks for reminding us, Peter. As I was saying, if, by chance, one of those inventions, say, electricity would cease to be, we would be at a loss and in total confusion. We rely so much on it, that in one week without it, we would hardly survive. Because we would have no refrigeration - that is no fresh food - no radio, no TV, no computer, no lights in the house, no nothing. Then, I think, life suddenly would come to a standstill, and that just for a short time.

Can you imagine what would happen, if that ‘blackout’ would go on for a month or a year? No, you would not even consider it - because it is too painful even to think about, for you would have to change completely your habits and way of thinking. In other words, you would have to consider a new way of living.

To make my point, take two people, an uncivilized person and one of us. Suddenly, overnight a disaster of catastrophic dimension befalls us. We lose all our material possessions, house, car; our relatives disappear too. We have nowhere to go, because there is no government agency to assist us, no decent road; all our friends gone, we have nothing and nobody to lean on. On the other hand, the “wild” person, even though frightened almost to death, runs for his life to the place he know best, i.e. the wild.

Now my question is, who of the two do you think would have more probability of survival in such a predicament, you or me, or the “uncivilised” person?

Tony: I think the uncivilized individual somehow might survive. But then, isn’t the world mostly made up of people who are not like him?

Paul: That is my point. Civilization gave us, along with many good things, many bad habits, with too much comfort and pleasures of many kinds. Comfort and pleasure, along with a godless school system and brainwashing by the media, has numbed our senses and crippled our intellectual functioning to the point where we use only 30% of our potential. Only 30%! Is that what we call ‘evolving?’ Hardly.

An individual who is only using 30% of his potential is what we have come to expect in our society today - regardless of genetic makeup, background, education. Just carrying on our “ordinary” daily lives. But the day, for unknown reasons, when our cultural framework and ways of living and thinking will be reverses, that 30% of our potential won’t be good enough to save us from a total disaster.

Peter: The example of two different people, the civilized and the uncivilized, fits well here. It goes without saying that the outcome from a given stressful situation would be totally different, thanks to the different makeup of each individual. This makes me to think of the fallacy of evolution theory, which claims we are ‘evolving from ape to man, that is from an inferior realm to a higher one’.

Paul: You got it. From the Bible we understand that mankind did not evolve from Adam’s time to Jesus’ days. Actually, there is a clear decline, with loss of information - biological, moral, physical, spiritual, and intellectual over that time span.

We cannot deny that progress has its great advantages; it makes life easier and more pleasant. However, as I said, it does not increase to develop our potential for using 100% of our brain-cells. But I’ll come back to that, later.

Not a few scholars in the past had speculated on the reason why God chose that particular time, 2000 years ago, for Jesus, His only Son to live among us.

These scholars said that at that time human thought and the search for truth had, plausibly, come to a crossroads. The Greek thinkers and philosophers, like Heraclitus, Democritus, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, had said it all regarding the human existence and the meaning of life. The time was ripe for God to instil His Word in men’s heart and so to be received or rejected by them.

Paradoxically, in spite of the decline of Christianity in the last century where mores, culture, ethics and moral values have been undermined irreversibly, we, the remnant, will able to see, one day not too far from now, a 180^oturn of mankind to God, the Father of all.

1) If I had to draw a graph showing this historic human decline, with its successive turning point, I would place the number ‘100’ on top with Adam, and at the bottom, ‘0’ when Jesus’ came to show how mankind ‘devolved’, rather than ‘evolved’, that is from perfection, with the first Adam, to corrupted humanity, when Jesus arrived on earth.

2) I would draw a second line placing the letter ‘A’ in front of word ‘incarnation’ [Jesus’ time], and a letter Ώ’ near the ‘end of time’. Then, in between I would put the letter, ‘T’, for Christianity [as for the cross], near the word ‘present time’. The letter ‘A’, of course, is the starting point of Christianity up to the ‘T’ of the present time where we are today.

Metaphysically, the letter T is a sign, or symbol, which says many things. I) It signifies death [on the cross]; II) martyrdom; III) the vertical line stands for the relationship between God, the Creator, and creation [the cosmos], while the horizontal line indicates its universal dimension – east/west [Catholicism].

Nowadays, we find ourselves in a very unpredictable situation. Christianity is dying and the enemies of Christianity are many and on the rise. They claim that most of society’s ills derive from Christianity. They are trying hard to get rid of what is left of it. In times past, we had, among the masters of death, names like Nero, Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, Decius, Galerius and Diocletian, and more recently, Stalin, Hitler and Mao, and today, Robert Mugabe, Sharon, Kissinger, and Bush.

If the masters of death seem to have their way and have taken over the world, I believe, ultimately the master of life, the Lord Jesus, the Messiah will be the Victor over them. As in the time of Constantine, “In this sign you will conquer”, so, in the end the cross will win over our enemies.

As I described the “T”[1] represents the cross of Christianity, the tree of life in the Garden of Eden, and the conjunction point between the beginning [A] and the end [Ώ]. That is why St. Paul says in Galatians [6:14] “May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.

And in 2 Cor 5:17: “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”

[1] The letter ‘T’, numerically is the 20th in the English alphabet. If summed up 2+0=2. We have then the number 2, which represents the second person of the holy Trinity, and again, the second letter [T], after the first letter [A] and before the third [Ώ].