ARE YOU LOOKING FOR ANOTHER?

 

The above passage ends with Christ giving a blessing to those who would not be offended by him, a peculiar statement given the fact that he had just spent that day healing the sick, giving sight to the blind & raising the dead.  Certainly the Jews had waited millennia with great hope & longing for the arrival of their messiah.  Why then did Christ belie the fact that he knew he was going to be an offense to them?  I posit that the very reason Christ was not welcomed by most of his own people 2,000 years ago is the same reason he is not being received again today.

 

One of the earliest prophecies of a future messiah was given by Moses:

 

For Moses truly said unto the fathers,

 A prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you of your brethren,

like unto me;

 him shall ye hear in all things whatsoever he shall say unto you.

Acts 3:22

 

Moses was a humble man guiding a large group of escaped slaves through an ominous desert.  Certainly Christ satisfied the Mosaic description of the messianic figure.

 

However, much later in time after Moses God revealed to king David that the messiah would be of his seed.  David, the great & mighty warrior, slayer of giants & conqueror of many nations was quite a different presence from Moses.  He wore a bejeweled crown of the Amorites, a talent’s weight in gold, & lived in a luxurious house of cedar.  The territories he did not invade became his tributaries. Moreover, the many Davidic prophecies of Christ were poignantly documented throughout the books of the Psalms.  Certainly the Jews had every reason to expect their messiah to arrive as the flamboyant, conquering hero that had been David.

 

Christ, on the other hand, walked as a poor man, teaching in the synagogue by day & sleeping on a mountain by night.  He rode no horse, wore no sword & actually hid himself on various occasions when threatened by the prospect of Roman or Herodian imprisonment.  In the desert, he had to withstand the humiliation of Satan’s offer to give him the kingdoms of this world.

 

 

This is how the bible describes the person of Christ:

 

2 For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant,

and as a root out of a dry ground:

he hath no form nor comeliness;

and when we shall see him,

 there is no beauty that we should desire him.

3 He is despised and rejected of men;

a man of sorrows,

 and acquainted with grief:

and we hid as it were our faces from him;

 he was despised,

and we esteemed him not.

Isaiah 53:2-3

 

And it came to pass,

when the time was come that he should be received up,

he stedfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem,

52 And sent messengers before his face:

and they went,

and entered into a village of the Samaritans,

 to make ready for him.

53 And they did not receive him,

because his face was as though he would go to Jerusalem.

Luke 9:51-53

 

How could anyone have possibly anticipated the brilliance of God to send this obscure man of steely discipline on a suicide mission that would throw just the right monkey wrench into the smoothly running Satanic plot for total world domination?  Christ’s magnificent sacrifice gave the underdogs in this game world a fair playing field but only if the underdogs have the sense to understand how to use it well.  Most importantly, for those with the mettle to ‘drink from his cup’, Christ also forged the path to escape from the games altogether & to live with him eternally.

 

Today the promotional image of Christ is European in stature & type.  Certainly, Christ is rarely depicted as the Semite he was.  Moreover, he usually has lots of money.  In fact, many contemporary churches claim that he owns ALL the money in the world.  The garish sugar-daddy Jesus of the churches diametrically opposes ‘the simplicity that was Christ’, the poor man from Galilee that warned poor people against the sin of covetousness. 

 

There was an important reason the first of the Mosaic commandments required that there be no graven imagery of God.  Human weakness being what it is, images serve to lock perspective into delusional expectations of the real. 

 

If the authentic Christ were to walk into your life today, how would you receive him?  Would there be disappointment in your heart & longing for the gallant figure of a king David or would you be sincerely prepared to recognize the authentic messiah as your commander-in-chief, uniting with him in the battle for what is good & right & true?  There is no better time to inspect & prepare yourselves for what will shortly come to pass than this very hour.