God's New Rule

It the beginning, of everything, when there was only darkness and void, God made light.

In the beginning God created everything that exist and called it “very good.”

Then God trusted all that He had created into the hands of His male and female images.  Trusting that they would take care of all creation in very good ways.

That didn't work out so well.

Several centuries later we are told in the first verse of Mark’s Gospel: 

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. (Mark 1)

Jesus was brought a new beginning, for the original design, of what and how creation was made as “very good.”

The “beginning” — what God created as “Very  good,” Begins with Jesus.

As Eugene Peterson put it: “The authorial intent is explicit:  the story of Jesus is not a new story but a continuation of the first story.” (P. 230 As Kingfisher Catch Fire) 

This profound idea had not, in thirty some years,  registered in my of mine.

Just this morning I was thinking about  the Old testament theme of a God who test his people through a long forty years in the wilderness trying to get them to trust him with their lives.

As you read the entire Old Testament you begin to realized that God had his hands full with those he freed from the cruel hand of the Egyptians. 

With Moses, as the chosen one, God, led those Israelites through the sea into the “promise land.”  And for forty years they challenge God at every turn.  They were never satisfied.  

His original plan for earth’s creations was warn out and battered to death.

Picture the dry bones story: 

11 Then he said to me, ‘Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.” ¹²Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. ¹³And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. ¹⁴I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act, says the Lord.’ 

(Ezekiel 37). 

No life, no hope, no possibility, no imagination of God’s creative power.  Those unsatisfied Israelites were never happy.  Never willing to go along with God’s plan. 

And so God decided to change all the rules for living with this crazy-mixed-up human beings.

And He came down to earth and grew up in the boy Jesus.    

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. (Mark 1)

God came to start again with new rules — new kind of relationship. 

All He asked, from Jesus’ birth on, was that we believe the truth of who He was; and how He wanted us to live. No more scolding, punishing, warning.  

Just one thing mattered.

You can believe in me or not. 

Its Your life 

     It is Your choice.