DAY 336

TWO CANDLES

Ezekiel 42, 43 & 44 and 1 John 1

Ezekiel continues his vision of the new Temple, and its contents and rituals; it is 1^st John that I want to touch on today.

1^st John was thought to written in the late 1^st century, say 90 AD or so. It is written to affirm that Jesus was both human and divine. We might think that in our day and age we have all sorts of church controversies…we do, but this is nothing new.

In the first century there was a popular movement called “Gnosticism.” The meaning of the word Gnostic is “knowledge” and the movement shuns the material world and favors the ethereal spiritual world. Knowledge is the key. Who has the special knowledge that will get me away from this yucky material world where people get sick, to the heavenly spiritual world? You can see how this line of thinking is opposite of what we read in Genesis…God made the world and said it is very good!

As people began to find Christianity attractive, or at least parts of it, they then wanted to re-write it to fit their view of the world, and so emerged a sort of “Christian Gnosticism.” If we just pause and think about it, within 50-60 years of Jesus’ Resurrection and Ascension people were already picking and choosing what they wanted to believe about Jesus…1^st John seeks to clearly ground Jesus as both human and divine and we will see this especially in chapter 5, but in chapter 1 we read: “from the beginning…what we have seen with our eyes, what we have beheld with our hands…” The Gnostics did not argue that Jesus was God, just that he was not physical.

Jesus’ humanity and divinity is attested throughout Scripture, and here we read people exclaiming that this is not just something they read about, no they saw him and they touched him. The eye witness testimony of the Apostles is central to the New Testaments. You might ask, “Why is this important?” Think for a moment if Jesus is not human? What would that mean for you? What would that mean to all of what we have studied and read over this past year. Would Jesus understand your pain? Would Jesus have been the unblemished Lamb that was sacrificed for the sins of the world? Would Jesus have been born of a Virgin fulfilling the prophecies of Old? Would Jesus be “Son of David?” I could keep going, but if Jesus is not human and divine, then He is not the Jewish Messiah that Yahweh has been proclaiming through the prophets, nor is He the God-man who knows all your experiences and more. It is that last point, Jesus as Jewish Messiah that will help you find your way through most of the heresies out there…most disconnect him from the Old Testament—and to disconnect him from that is to disconnect him from the Covenant, the Law, the People, the Plan of Salvation, and more.

One last tidbit…if your Church has an Altar, or a Holy Communion table, it probably has two candles on it. It may have more candles behind it and around, but it probably has two on it – they are meant to symbolize Jesus’ humanity and divinity.