Status Updates From Encounters with Jesus: Unex...

Ch4Q: how things can be put right in the world…how did Jesus come to do it?
Answer (summarized): By taking our shame and the brokenness around us, cleansing by His own substitutionary shame and death, and giving us access to abundant joy and life. The miracle of water to wine was a foreshadowing - in order to have the feast of celebration (wedding), He had to wash us clean (ceremonial jars) by His blood (wine).

Dr. Clowney put it something like this: "Jesus sat amidst all the joy of the wedding feast sipping the coming sorrow so that today you and I who believe in him can sit amidst all this world's sorrow sipping the coming joy."

Could it be that he loves his own like that? That he delights in you like that?
Yes, he does. How different would your life be if you lived in moment-by-moment existential awareness of that?

…every time God chooses a metaphor to help us see him better, it also shows us how he sees us. If he is like our bridegroom, then if you give yourself to Jesus in faith, it means he must really delight in us.

God cannot just wish away the debt, and it's not because he doesn't love you enough. Actually, it's quite the opposite. God is so holy he had to come in the form of Jesus Christ and die to pay the debt, but he is so loving he was glad to come and die for you.

He came to die, to shed his blood, to take the cup of curse and punishment so we can raise the cup of blessing and love.

He did not come primarily to be a good example. And I'm glad he didn't. Do you know why? …Anyone who really, seriously, seeks to make him a life model, who pays attention to the details of his character and practice, will despair. He is infinitely beyond us, and comparing yourself to him will only grind your genuine aspirations to moral excellence into hopelessness.

How is Jesus going to bring us our joy? By losing all of his.

Maybe he is thinking of his own wedding, with infinite joy and utter horror at the same time. And so let's paraphrase what he is saying one more time: "Mother…For my people to drink the cup of joy and festival blessing, I'm going to have to drink the cup of justice and punishment and death."

And this is how history ends; this is what Jesus came to accomplish. We, the bride, the people Jesus has loved, will finally be united with him. The most rapturous love of a wedded couple on earth is just the dimmest hint and echo of that cosmic future reality.

So it would actually be more honest to say, "I'm somehow the same as those who have done terrible things. I am made of the same human stuff. There must be something down deep in me that is capable of great ... And Jesus came to cleanse us of this, to purify us from what is spiritually wrong with us.

But these young people were facing certain public shame and guilt. Jesus Christ rescues them from all of that. And by employing the jars normally used for ceremonial washing, he is saying that he has come into the world to accomplish in reality what the ceremonial and sacrificial laws of the Old Testament pointed to [our spiritual need for cleansing to connect with God].

He is saying, as it were, I am the true master of the banquet. I am Lord of the Feast.
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"Yes," he is saying, "I'm going to suffer. Yes, there's going to be self-denial. Yes, there's going to be sacrifice-for me first and then for my followers as well. But it's all a means to an end, which is festival joy!

Consider that this is the very beginning of Jesus' career, of his public ministry. Imagine you are a candidate for office, an entrepreneur launching a brand, or a musician releasing your first major recording. In every case, you will choose your first public presentation with enormous care. …Why would Jesus decide that a quintessential signifier of all he is about would be to keep a party going?

Ch3’s Q: what— or who-can put the world right?
Answer (summarized): Someone fully divine and unhindered and perfect in His power and life. Also someone fully man, able to take on the full scope of the consequences of brokenness — mortal, vulnerable, killable.

“And so he wrote himself in. Behold who Jesus is, how he loves you and how he came to put the world right.”

Our relationship to God, then, is more like Shakespeare’s relationship to Hamlet. How much will Hamlet know about Shakespeare? Only what Shakespeare writes about himself into the play.

So after he raises Lazarus, the leaders have a meeting, and by verse 53, John says, "So from that day on they plotted to take his life." …He knew the only way to interrupt Lazarus's funeral was to summon his own…He knew what it would cost him to save us from death. Maybe he was able to feel the jaws of death closing in on him. And yet knowing and experiencing all that, he cried, "Lazarus, come out."

If God is that unhappy with the world as it is, why doesn't he just show up and stop it? …But that question reveals a lack of self-knowledge.
The Bible says— and we know deep down—-that so much that is wrong with the world is wrong because of the human heart…if Jesus Christ had come to earth with the sword of God's wrath against evil, none of us would have been left to tell about it.