“This is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life.-John 3:16 MSG The Message
I must confess that sometimes while I am writing or teaching a particular series,I am usually not sure about what the next series would be.It is not for lack of content but there are usually so many things going on that I begin to wonder ,”Lord what is the best direction to take the next series” .I do do this quite ahead of time and eventually get something, sometimes it comes quite close to when the new series is about to begin.
So recently ,it got impressed on my heart to start treating in this Lent season what we will call "The Why Series". The Why series is a look at three questions that relate to Jesus Firstly we will deal with” Why Jesus came”,secondly “Why Jesus died “and then finally “Why Jesus rose”. Sometimes we may think we do know more than we actually do and that is what I actually discovered as I began to study and the Holy Spirit threw light on several other Scriptures,I realized that apart from redemption, there were some other reasons why Jesus came and these proved to be of great comfort to me and I sure believe will be to you also .
So before we delve into these reasons,I would like to establish two things. The first of these is the fact that the coming of Jesus was not an afterthought. It was not a last resort or a fire brigade approach to the fall of man. This fall of man occurred as a result of the sin of Adam and Eve. They disobeyed God and their sin had to be atoned for by the shedding of blood (Hebrews 9:22 ).And although physical blood was shed when God made clothes for them ( Genesis 3:21), we are also told in Scriptures that before the foundation of the world, the lamb himself was already slain (1 Peter 1:20 &Revelation 1:8).
The second of these truths is that the coming of Jesus to the earth was not the beginning of his existence. There are several Scriptural references that support this pre-existence .Right from the Genesis account, we see God talking in the plural 'let us make man…'(Genesis 1 : 26 ).Also during the building of the Tower of Babel still in Genesis ,it was still the plural term used for let us go and see what man is doing (Genesis 11:1-9 ).
This pre-existence of Jesus is supported by Apostle John who tells us at the very introduction of the book of John : 'In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word is God ….'(John 1:1-3).These very first three verses are very much similar to the first three verses of Genesis 1(Genesis 1:1-3).He goes further to also tell us in his first letter that there are three that bear record in heaven(1 John 3: ),the father ,the Son and the Spirit And in verse 8 of the same chapter, he tells us that the son of God “appeared”. This fact that he appeared denotes that he was existing somewhere else. This same letter contains the phrase he appeared in both verse 5&8(1 John 3:5,8).
Having established these two important truths as foundation blocks for our series, we will begin to consider in the next post some of the reasons why Jesus came.
In His Service,
Grace Tom-Lawyer
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