What makes you angry?  Most of us have a pattern to our fits of anger that we repeat over and over.  Myself, I most often get angry when I am tired, allowing myself to be stressed by circumstances and pushing to get good things done that need to be done.  In this state, something will often happen such as dropping the bowl of fruit I am trying to place somewhere in the crowded refrigerator , spilling it all over the fridge and the floor.  Then I will explode in hot anger scaring the dog and irritating my wife.  In a moment or two I will calm down and then I am ashamed at my lack of self control.

     This is my usual pattern for most of my fits of anger.  Others’ patterns may be different.  It does not matter what one’s pattern is; the important thing is to understand your pattern and then you can be aware of it.  Then you can change your thought and actions, avoiding the pattern and controlling your frustration and anger.  For me this means not pushing so hard to get everything done.  When I realize I am getting tired, stop and rest a little bit, say a prayer, think about what I am doing and quit pushing to get everything done right then.  This makes my work and my day more enjoyable and things get done with a lighter and less straining touch. 

      Some say of their anger, “but it is only for a moment and then I am over it.”  But a shotgun blast last only for a moment but look at the damage it leaves behind and so it is with all uncontrolled anger. James 1: 19-20 says, “So then my brethren, let everyone be swift to hear but slow to anger; for the wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God. ”The fruits of the Spirit that we are to project to other people at all times, “love, joy, peace, goodness, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, patience and self endurance,” (Gal. 5: 22-23) cannot ever be present when we are angry. Anger and these spiritual fruits cannot ever co-exist.

     Why should we control our anger?  I say control because controlled anger can be a great tool for doing righteous things.   Controlled anger that is channeled into fighting for the weak, oppressed and poor who are being mistreated is a very righteous Christ like work.  Controlled anger that enables you to stand up for yourself when you are being bullied or taken advantage of is also a very righteous and necessary task.  God did not call us to be weak or a doormat for anybody.  His children must stand tall in all of life.  Even turning the other cheek in the historical context that Jesus taught it meant not meek submission but was a non violent way of standing up to a bully who considered himself a social superior in a way that turned the insult upon him and shamed him in front of others.

     We need to control our anger for our own well being. “Sixty seconds of anger is several minutes of happiness lost.”  Many accidents are because of anger.  One of my best friends after a bad basketball game hit his steel locker door in anger and spent the rest of the season with his hand in a cast.  A rage of anger tends to leave you exhausted and later you are despondent.  Anger is a depressant which drains our energy.  Anger that simmers and seethes is even more depressing because it causes a constant siphoning off of energy.

     How can you control your anger?  Fortunately there is a very simple effective method anybody can use well.  It is Proverbs 15: 1, “A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.”  When anger rises, simply say a soft word to your self, the other person or to the accident or situation.  It could be simply the prayer, “Dear God.”  But  saying it softly will dissapate the anger like the air of a punctured balloon and no harm will be done.  This technique will help you to fly into a great calm of grace instead of a destructive rage and you will be proud of your self control.  Try answering your anger softly and see how it works for you.

     Pesher was a Hebrew word for a form of exegesis or interpretation used by the Qumran sect of Essenes and by the early Church which saw the whole of scripture as a code, referring to their own group or community in the last days.  The Church used this form of exegesis to peruse closely all the law and the prophets to find prophetic pointings to Jesus and the Gentiles.  Jewish people had for centuries developed a new pesher to find things in the Old Testament which were relevant to their group in their new historical context. Thus in this way the entire Old Testament were effectively reinterpreted in a new way to make it speak to the people more relevantly in their new historical circumstance.  This made the Hebrew Bible a living book.

     The earliest Christian missionaries preached first to their fellow Jews.  But they were surprised by the response of Gentiles to their message of Jesus, especially among the God fearers.  These were Gentiles who worshipped in Jewish synagogues because they admired the Jewish ethics and God as superior and helpful.  Jews who were dispersed among the various nations welcomed these Gentiles and did not demand them to be strict monotheists because they believed God gave only Israel the command to worship him alone. 

     These Gentiles did not convert to Judaism which would have meant being circumcised and following the Torah’s dietary laws. But they did gladly try to follow the moral code of the Jews and generally liked the idea of one God.

     So when the Jewish Christians began preaching Christ and found a significant number of Gentile converts in their congregations they were put in a quandary.  None rally objected to the presence of Gentiles but they disagreed strongly as to the terms under which they should be admitted to the Church. 

     Conservative Christians such as James, the Lord’s brother, felt they should be circumcised and convert to Judaism.  But circumcision could sometimes be dangerous for adult males and many Jewish Christians felt that since this was the last days and the present world order was passing away there was no need for converting Gentiles to Judaism to follow Christ.  (Gal. 2:1-10; 5: 3; Acts 15.)

     But many of the Jews were liberal and progressive on this issue and did not see the Gentiles as any problem at all and energetically sought to convert them everywhere. Peter won  Romans in Caesarea.  Barnabus, a Greek speaking Jew from Cyprus, had a large number of Gentiles in his church at Antioch.  An unknown person founded a church of Jews and Gentile in Rome early on.  And of course Paul was known as the apostle to the Gentiles.

     Surprisingly, the dedication and purity of these Gentile converts impressed and inspired many Jews and others. Their foregoing the worship of other gods, idols, cut them off socially from the trade guilds necessary to their business and from all community festivities which were part of the worship of various gods. But these Gentile converts generally let their light shine on.   

     This marvelous response by Gentiles to the Gospel of Christ made the Jewish Christians ask why is God doing this wonderful thing among the Gentiles at this time?  They answered this by using their pesher to interpret the code of Hebrew scriptures for their new community  to find scriptures like Isa. 2: 2-3; Zeph. 3: 9; Tobit 14: 6; Zech. 8:23 which they believed predicted that Gentiles would share in Israel’s triumph and voluntarily throw away their idols.  The church’s pesher was the same viewpoint as other Jewish sects.  They chose an exegesis that saw a code in scripture which saw themselves as the true Israel and as being the apple of God’s eye at the center of the world.

     But there is a great danger in this religious mindset.  There is a strong current of universalism to be found running through scripture.  I believe that God’s salvation is ultimately salvation for all people.  Christ truly died for all people.  As Origen. The church’s first systematic theologian, taught in the second and third centuries the power of God’s love and grace shall ultimately  redeem all of Hell.  I believe that wholelistic universalism is much more mentally healthy than seeing your group as the central purpose of the whole world and history.

     This pesher in relation to the Gentile response caused the church to truly believe that Jesus was the Messiah, the last days had come and the Kingdom of God was really at hand.  This new end of the world doctrine was most forcefully promoted by the apostle Paul.  Is there a need for a new pesher or exegesis to be evolved today in order for Christianity to advance in positively affecting the world?  I certainly think so.              

                                         # 36, Christian Reading of Psalm 22

     From the very beginning, Christians read the scriptures of Israel as a prophetic witness of Jesus Christ.  Since the basic theme of the Old Testament is seeking the righteousness or justice of God in individual and community life which is also the theme of Jesus who taught, “Seek you first the Rule of God and its Justice and other necessary things will be added unto you,”- one can see how it is easy to connect the Old Testament to Jesus Christ.

     Early Christians did this with typology which means prefiguring.  They interpreted every good event or person as prefiguring or picturing Christ.  Then they applied allegorical method to many scriptures to change the literal sense of them so that they, too, pictured or foretold Christ.

     They also used the method of historicizing prophecy which for 2,000 years formed the way the church saw the Old Testament.  Historicizing prophecy is taking a passage from the past from the Jewish Bible and using it to tell a new story such as the gospels of the New Testament.  Historicizing does not mean making something historical or factual.  It means using an older scripture in a newer story to connect the new story to the older one and give the new story more credibility.  This was a powerful method of telling a new story for Jewish people.  Because the more the new story seemed connected to the revered writings of the past the more it was prone to be accepted. 

      Matthew, who wrote for Jewish Christians and non- Christian Jews, used the historicizing method more than any other New Testament author.  He often twisted Old Testament scriptures to make them fit in his story of Jesus.

     Unfortunately, as the church grew and became more Gentile, it, in hatred, disconnected itself from its Jewish roots and the method of historicizing prophecy became misunderstood as being literally true. This then led to the church’s misunderstanding of the relationship between the Old and New Testaments as being one of prophecy and fulfillment or more commonly prediction and fulfillment.  Even today many believe that almost everything about Jesus Christ was predicted somewhere in the Old Testament.

     Many in the church were taught from childhood that there were scores of predictions of Jesus’ life and ministry in the Old Testament and they all came true.  Thus, they say, this proves that Jesus was the Messiah and that the Bible is supernaturally inspired scripture.  But that is not so.  It did not predict Jesus life and ministry and it is not a supernaturally inspired book.  It is a book with much saving good but it is not supernatural and able to predict the future.

      This wrong thinking about the relationship of the two testaments greatly influenced how the life and death of Jesus are seen.  It led to the inference that things had to happen the way they did because they were foreordained by God as part of his plan.  It was inevitable that Jesus would be killed by the authorities, but not because God ordained it to be so. Rather it was because Jesus was fighting the evil religious-political domination system of his day and requiring that people would turn to God’s Rule and practice his justice.  So his execution was inevitable but it was not God’s will. No parent would ever will his son to be killed so horribly.  Jesus did not die for our sins to pay for them.  It was not necessary.  He died because of our sins which worship systems of selfish power rather than serving God’s rule and justice.  Jesu’ death shows us God’s deep love which freely forgives us our sins without someone having to make payment for them when we turn to him.  The Bible has never predicted the price of cabbages much less how God’s beloved son should die.

     Mark was written about 70 CE right after the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed by Rome.  This is four decades after Jesus’ death and resurrection.  So most likely all eye witnesses to the crucifixion were dead.  It is doubtful that anyone remembers accurately all the details of Jesus’ crucifixion. 

      Mark historicizes Psalm 22 making it look like, to the uninformed, that Psalm 22 predicted even the minute details of Jesus’ crucifixion..  He uses this past scripture, Psalm 22, which is about an individual who suffers harsh, unjust persecution when he is a righteous man.  He uses it to structure his telling of the details of Jesus’ death.  It does not matter if these details are actually how it happened.  Mark conveys Jesus suffering and the meaning of his death.  His death is so powerful that the Gentile Centurion, used to worshipping the emperor as the Son of God, cries out as Jesus breathes his last that truly this man was the Son of God.  The details of Mark’s story may not be historical because it is doubtful he even knew the details.

     Mark has Jesus’ last words being, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  This is a quote of Ps.22: 1 which shows that Jesus’ suffering and anguish and loneliness were very real. “They divided up his clothes and cast lots to see what each would get,”   comes from Psalm 22: 18.  Two phrases from Psalm 22: 7 are borrowed by Mark in 15: 29, 31 when he says that Jesus is “mocked” by people “shaking their heads.”

      One cannot know for sure whether Psalm 22 was used to generate the details of this story or whether it is being used to comment on things that happened.  But it is certain Psalm 22 was not written to predict this horrible death of Jesus.  Mark and others knew Jesus’ suffering and agony were real. And as the second half of Psalm 22 says of its sufferer,  Jesus would likewise be vindicated by God.  That vindication was his resurrection and exaltation.  And by all his life, death and resurrection we are saved.

     From the very beginning, Christians read the scriptures of Israel as a prophetic witness of Jesus Christ.  Since the basic theme of the Old Testament is seeking the righteousness or justice of God in individual and community life which is also the theme of Jesus who taught, “Seek you first the Rule of God and its Justice and other necessary things will be added unto you,”- one can see how it is easy to connect the Old Testament to Jesus Christ.

     Early Christians did this with typology which means prefiguring.  They interpreted every good event or person as prefiguring or picturing Christ.  Then they applied allegorical method to many scriptures to change the literal sense of them so that they, too, pictured or foretold Christ.

     They also used the method of historicizing prophecy which for 2,000 years formed the way the church saw the Old Testament.  Historicizing prophecy is taking a passage from the past from the Jewish Bible and using it to tell a new story such as the gospels of the New Testament.  Historicizing does not mean making something historical or factual.  It means using an older scripture in a newer story to connect the new story to the older one and give the new story more credibility.  This was a powerful method of telling a new story for Jewish people.  Because the more the new story seemed connected to the revered writings of the past the more it was prone to be accepted. 

      Matthew, who wrote for Jewish Christians and non- Christian Jews, used the historicizing method more than any other New Testament author.  He often twisted Old Testament scriptures to make them fit in his story of Jesus.

     Unfortunately, as the church grew and became more Gentile, it, in hatred, disconnected itself from its Jewish roots and the method of historicizing prophecy became misunderstood as being literally true. This then led to the church’s misunderstanding of the relationship between the Old and New Testaments as being one of prophecy and fulfillment or more commonly prediction and fulfillment.  Even today many believe that almost everything about Jesus Christ was predicted somewhere in the Old Testament.

     Many in the church were taught from childhood that there were scores of predictions of Jesus’ life and ministry in the Old Testament and they all came true.  Thus, they say, this proves that Jesus was the Messiah and that the Bible is supernaturally inspired scripture.  But that is not so.  It did not predict Jesus life and ministry and it is not a supernaturally inspired book.  It is a book with much saving good but it is not supernatural and able to predict the future.

      This wrong thinking about the relationship of the two testaments greatly influenced how the life and death of Jesus are seen.  It led to the inference that things had to happen the way they did because they were foreordained by God as part of his plan.  It was inevitable that Jesus would be killed by the authorities, but not because God ordained it to be so. Rather it was because Jesus was fighting the evil religious-political domination system of his day and requiring that people would turn to God’s Rule and practice his justice.  So his execution was inevitable but it was not God’s will. No parent would ever will his son to be killed so horribly.  Jesus did not die for our sins to pay for them.  It was not necessary.  He died because of our sins which worship systems of selfish power rather than serving God’s rule and justice.  Jesu’ death shows us God’s deep love which freely forgives us our sins without someone having to make payment for them when we turn to him.  The Bible has never predicted the price of cabbages much less how God’s beloved son should die.

     Mark was written about 70 CE right after the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed by Rome.  This is four decades after Jesus’ death and resurrection.  So most likely all eye witnesses to the crucifixion were dead.  It is doubtful that anyone remembers accurately all the details of Jesus’ crucifixion. 

      Mark historicizes Psalm 22 making it look like, to the uninformed, that Psalm 22 predicted even the minute details of Jesus’ crucifixion..  He uses this past scripture, Psalm 22, which is about an individual who suffers harsh, unjust persecution when he is a righteous man.  He uses it to structure his telling of the details of Jesus’ death.  It does not matter if these details are actually how it happened.  Mark conveys Jesus suffering and the meaning of his death.  His death is so powerful that the Gentile Centurion, used to worshipping the emperor as the Son of God, cries out as Jesus breathes his last that truly this man was the Son of God.  The details of Mark’s story may not be historical because it is doubtful he even knew the details.

     Mark has Jesus’ last words being, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  This is a quote of Ps.22: 1 which shows that Jesus’ suffering and anguish and loneliness were very real. “They divided up his clothes and cast lots to see what each would get,”   comes from Psalm 22: 18.  Two phrases from Psalm 22: 7 are borrowed by Mark in 15: 29, 31 when he says that Jesus is “mocked” by people “shaking their heads.”

      One cannot know for sure whether Psalm 22 was used to generate the details of this story or whether it is being used to comment on things that happened.  But it is certain Psalm 22 was not written to predict this horrible death of Jesus.  Mark and others knew Jesus’ suffering and agony were real. And as the second half of Psalm 22 says of its sufferer,  Jesus would likewise be vindicated by God.  That vindication was his resurrection and exaltation.  And by all his life, death and resurrection we are saved.

     The importance of Christian reading in creating our New Testament was brought home to me by Professor Phillip Carey of Eastern University in a course he taught a few years ago which was The History of Christian Theology.  Christian reading of the Old Testament writings in Church and private study gave rise to all the major ideas of Jesus in the New Testament, even the telling of Jesus death and resurrection.

     Keep in mind that the first Christians of the first two decades were almost all converted Jews or Gentiles known as God-fearers who worshipped in Jewish synagogues but did become Jews by the rite of circumcision.  So the makeup of early Christian congregations was almost entirely of people who were used to the writings of Israel as their devotional sources of guidance and worship.  Thus they kept reading the writings of Israel as a central part of their worship and personal life as a Christian.

     Now, these writings were not known as the Old Testament then.  They were just the writings of Israel.  They were finally canonized by the Jews as the Hebrew Bible in about 100 CE.  But the Church called them the Old Testament.  When dealing with Jewish people it is most respectful to refer to them as the Hebrew Bible.

     So the Church from the beginning chose to read the scriptures of Israel as authoritative for the Christian life and as bearing witness to Jesus Christ.  They did this in spite of the fact that much of the Hebrew Bible history and laws had no application to Gentiles.  The Old Testament was not originally written to point to Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ.  Its core message was walking in the love of God and love of one’s fellow man in the historical settings of Israel.  But the Church reinvented the Old Testament through its reading of it to turn it into a testimony of the life, message and meaning of Jesus Christ. 

     This reinventing was offensive to non-Christian Jews but it was not invalid as the early Christians simply borrowed methods of reinterpretation that Jewish scholars used over the centuries to now and then totally reinvent the Hebrew Writings from their literal meaning and from their cruel and barbaric passages into something that spoke upliftingly to their current circumstance.  This kept these writings from dying out in their influence and continue to be living scriptures for a new age. 

      And this is what the early church did with Israel’s writings which made them live and speak to a whole new age of people in a more universal way.  A key tool in reinventing these ancient writings into a testimony to Jesus as the Christ was typology.  In Typology the people and events of the Old Testament prefigure Jesus and the events of the New Testament.  For example, Abraham prefigures the Church which is justified by grace through faith.  Joseph, forgiving his brothers, prefigures the forgiveness of God through Jesus Christ.  The glory of the story of King David points to the glory of the eternal kingship of Jesus Christ.  The Son of Man in Daniel 7: 13, which was Judas Maccabee, points to Jesus as the overcoming Son of Man.  The Temple worship liturgy points to Jesus who opened up access to God for all, etc. 

     Another major tool that the church used to turn the Old Testament into a testimony of Jesus is allegory which is giving the original text another meaning in addition to its literal sense, a meaning that points beyond the historical context of the text to eternal truth.  Paul used both of these methods of reinterpretation extensively.  When Paul said, in the Corinthian letter, “The letter kills.  The spirit gives life,” he was saying he was no longer concerned primarily with the literal meaning of the law and the prophets.  Instead he was concerned with how these old writings could corroborate and further the spiritual power of the new gospel of Jesus Christ.  The New Testament is full of the use of typology and allegory in applying the writings of Israel to tell the story of Jesus and the Church.  We will deal with Christian reading more in our next article and show how Christian reading reinterpretation was used to tell the story of Jesus death in the gospel of Mark.  But I close here by saying that to be a grateful follower of Jesus Christ is to be grateful to the Jewish people for giving us some of our greatest gifts which we use daily.

     In 70 CE the great Temple built by Herod was destroyed by the Romans in the Jewish- Roman war.  It was the second time Jerusalem’s temple had been destroyed.  Only two of the Jewish sects that abounded during the late second temple period survived this war and moved forward.  The first was the Jesus Movement and the second was the Pharisees who went on to establish modern rabbinic Judaism, the main form of Judaism today.  This brought many reforms that Jesus would have approved of, such as the temple where God really resides is in the hearts and community where God’s word is kept and obeyed.  The Jesus movement also had the very same idea.

     The Jesus movement was very unusual in Palestine where most of the Jewish sects wanted nothing to do with Gentiles.  But the Jews dispersed throughout the world were much more open to Gentiles and Hellenism, Greek thought and culture.  Most of the dispersed Jews could not read Hebrew and most in Palestine spoke Aramaic rather than Hebrew.  Thus when the Hebrew Scriptures were read most Jews needed a translation. Jews had started to translate their scriptures into Greek in the third century BCE on the Island of Pharos just off the coast of Alexandria, Egypt.  

      Legend has it that Ptolemy Philadephus, the Greek ruler of Egypt, so liked the Jewish scriptures that he asked the High Priest in Jerusalem to send six elders from each of the twelve tribes to him to translate the Hebrew writings into Greek. When these scholars had finished, everyone agreed that the translation was superb and should be preserved as perfect forever just as it was.  In honor of the 70 plus scholars the translation was called the Septuagint, the Seventy.

     Another legend says that these seventy exegetes were so inspired that each came up with the same word for translation for every Hebrew word in every instance.  Such was the reverence for the Septuagint held by the dispersed Jews such as Philo, the Jewish philosopher, who was contemporary to John the baptizer and Jesus.

     Philo did not invent the method of allegorical interpretation but he lifted it to a high  level of usage, influencing the contemporary Jewish world and the writing of the New Testament to some extent.  Greek educated Jews and Greek speaking Gentiles often found the Hebrew Bible to be barbarous, incomprehensible.  Philo wanted to show that the biblical tales were what the Greeks called myths.  They had a timeless dimension that transcended their historical dimension and they could become a spiritual reality in the lives of the people of his day. 

     Philo basically reinterpreted the biblical characters and stories allegorically into the Greek philosophy of logos, reason, which prevailed in his day and which he loved as he did his Hebrew scriptures.  Sometimes this allegorical method shows up in our New Testament in places like Romans where Paul interprets Abraham as the first Christian.  He says, “Abraham believed and was justified by his faith.”  And thus all Christians are true children of Abraham.  Then in Galatians Paul allegorically makes Abraham’s slave wife, Hagar, stand for the law or Sinai Covenant which enslaves but his wife Sarah is the wife of Promise and thus represents the new covenant in Christ which makes us free.

      I am not trying to say we should all become allegorists.  Rather I am saying that throughout history the Bible story has been kept alive and made meaningful to the people of new ages by innovative people who courageously reinterpreted the Bible to apply it to a new age.  And this is what the Jesus movement did.  It reinterpreted the whole Hebrew Bible and made it all point to Jesus of Nazareth and his way that he taught. 

     Jesus taught us that a wise child of the Kingdom of God takes the good of the old and mixes it with the good of the new.  What progressive new changes should we be making today in our lives, our religion, our outlook?  Wisdom never stands still; it always moves forward.

     The Bible speaks often of God dealing or helping people through their dreams.  The ancient world put a lot of stock in their dreams.  In Deuteronomy 13: 1-5 God warns against listening to dreams that lead in the false, self destructive direction.  So dreams are not infallible guidance.  They are not absolute or whole truth but they do contain a partial truth which will balance us in our decision making process if we rationally think them through with meditation and prayer and accept the partial truth they hold.  God can give us wisdom through our dreams. 

     In Joel 2: 28 there is a very positive promise of a time when God will pour out Her Spirit on all people.  “Your sons and daughters will prophesy.  Your Young men will have visions and your old men will dream dreams.”  Perhaps it is expressed this way because Joel is aware on some level that the older men may be more prone to examine their dreams to attain a wholesome interpretation of them to apply to the energetic visions of the young and thus balance energy of vision with wisdom of how best to accomplish both the vision and the dream.

     So God can help us to wisdom through our dreams if we wisely examine them with reflection, prayer, meditation and clear thinking.  This is work, but it yields marvelous fruit.

     There are basic guidelines to be followed in harvesting profitable wisdom from our dreams.  The particular truth of any dream is always aimed at the dreamer himself and not to others.  Even grotesque and trivial dreams hold great importance in showing one what his or her immediate difficulty is.

     Dreams have a compensatory, balancing quality. They bring from our unconscious what we are neglecting or overlooking in our decision making process, which balances or compensates us for what we are not thinking about in our given situation.  Since dreams are never absolute truth you need to examine them only for their partial truth.  For example, your dreams may remind you of past fears that you have submerged for quite awhile.  You never want to make a decision based soley on your fears. Doing so will destroy you in the long run.  But you do want to honestly remember your fears and your past terrors and embrace them so as to not deny but make a friend of them.  Saying, as you go ahead with what you have determined as best for you, that the fear will be present but you will not let it dominate you and keep you from the success you need to achieve. 

      In this way you move forward but with caution for you admit that the terrifying may occur again but you will face it with hope and courage and become the stronger for your fears.  This is the way God guides us through our dreams. 

      We are contradictory creatures with love and hate, fear and trust, desire for and rejection of always present with us.  Only by comparing the emotions caused by our dreams with our conscious attitude can we see the whole picture of our situation.  Then we can choose which side we will take, which path we will walk.  And we can best choose the positive path when we remember honestly our negatives, determining to carry them with us on our path consciously but choosing to never let them dominate.

     When we do this, God’s word to us is, “Fear not to do that which you desire in your heart and I will bless you in the doing far more than you can ever imagine.”  This is basically what God spoke to Joseph in his dream about Mary in Matthew 1: 20-21.  And this is the beauty of life.

     Neither dreams nor life events are as important as what we do with them.  If our goal is God, then through our unconscious and conscious experience a loving, benevolent Providence guides “working everything together for our good.”  (Rom. 8:31).  And we “can do all things through God who strengthens us.”  (Phil. 4:13).  Thus “since God is for us who can be against us?”  (Rom. 8: 31).  ( Dream ideas borrowed from “The Inner World of Man by Frances G. Wickes.)

     The very early church believed Jesus would return to earth in glory very soon to inaugurate the Kingdom of God on earth.  Paul promoted this in his earliest epistles such as I Thessalonians 4: 14-17 and 5:2-3.  For Paul the return of Christ was imminent.  It would occur in his lifetime.  He advised the Corinthians in I Corinthians chapter 7 to not marry if they could contain themselves because it would possibly distract them from serving the Lord daily and the Lord would return at any moment and destroy the whole world and social order anyway. 

     What ever Paul meant by, “We that are alive shall be caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air,” is anybody’s guess.  The popular idea that it means the “Rapture” of living people up in the air to meet Jesus is a bunch of hooey as far as I am concerned. 

     In 1953 Billy Graham preached on the “Hour of Decision” on the five major interpretations the church has strongly held to at different times in history.  There is this one that is still very prevalent today.  But after the first century some of the church felt that the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost was the fulfillment of the return of Christ and in a way it was.  Others have said that Christ came in judgment at the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE.  Still others hold that at the conversion to Christ of any individual, Christ has returned by coming to indwell that individual and this too is true.  But the one that I like best has been held by a large portion of the church throughout the ages.  And it is that Christ’s second coming occurs for everyone when they die.  For the moment we die, we all are raised into a spiritual body for the next life and our judgment begins.  The standard of judgment for all of us is the kind of humanity that Christ lived and taught.  The goal of God is to make us like his unique son, Jesus.  For me this is the correct and most healthy view of the second coming of Christ. 

      The view of the imminent physical return of Jesus before they would die created an excitement and a restlessness which were far from being healthy.  And whenever this view has come to an exciting focus, it has born an unhealthy fruit.  Jesus taught us to judge a tree by its fruit and consistently bad fruit means the tree is bad.  Paul in his latter years seemed to turn away from his idea of Christ’ return in his own lifetime when in Phillippians 1: 23 he says that the best thing is for him to depart this body and be with Christ.  This is far better than anxiously awaiting Christ’s return in one’s own lifetime.

     The early church in Jerusalem was led by James, the brother of Jesus.  He was well known as the righteous one and had good relations with both the Pharisees and the Essenes.  James was executed by one of the Herods in about 41 CE.  Then another James took over the leadership of the Jerusalem Church.  The Jerusalem Church so believed in the imminent return of Christ that they sold their property and held the wealth in common.  But later when a drought hit the area of Judea, the Jerusalem Christians were starving because they had no means to provide for themselves.  Paul and others led the Gentile churches of Asia Minor to collect offerings to take to the starving Jerusalem Christians and save them. 

      As with all great movements we often over glorify the early Jesus movement as an example of near perfect Christianity.  The early Jesus movement did have greatness and grace in it but it had error and false thinking also.  In short it was good but it was about as messed up as the church today. 

     Jesus taught that his kingdom is one of the heart and mind.  It grows by the power of loving service and compassionate good works; God does not force it upon anybody.  Why would God at the last change his way of love and bring Christ physically back with a physical kingdom to force people to conform to God’s way?  I think that this is the wish of Christian ministers who are angry at the world for not recognizing their correctness.  But the more we grow in God’s way of love the more we outgrow this childish viewpoint. 

     Christ will come.  There is a judgment.  And God’s grace and love will prevail over all but not by force.  “Convince a man against his will; and he abides of the same opinion still!”

     Anti-Roman feeling amongst the Jews was especially rampant during the national Jewish festivals.  It was at one of those festivals, the Passover, in about 30 CE that Jesus was crucified by Pontius Pilate.  But that did not end the movement led by Jesus.  In fact it was just beginning.

     Some disciples were quickly convinced that God Raised Jesus from the dead.  They claimed they had seen him in visions.  In I Corinthians 15: 1-7, Paul infers that Jesus who appeared to him as alive from dead, in the same manner was also seen by many other in the Jesus movement and he lists those significant people. In Acts chapter 9 it is clear that Jesus appeared to Paul in a vision on the Damascus road.  The clear implication is that all the appearances of the risen Jesus were vision experiences.  The validation of these vision experiences for Paul and the others is that they totally transformed for the good the lives of those who experienced the visions.

     At first the teaching of the church is not of the bodily resurrection of Jesus.  Paul makes this abundantly clear in the great resurrection treatise of I Corinthians 15.  Jesus was raised as a spiritual body and all of us will be raised as a spiritual body.  This means the essential whole person is raised as spirit or soul for participation in the World of Spirit with God who is Spirit.  Paul knows nothing, apparently of the resurrection stories of a bodily resurrection of Jesus which are written some year after his death.  Paul makes it explicit that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God.”  Heaven is a World of Spirit and not physical bodies which are adapted to this world alone. One must have a spirit or spiritual body for the World of Spirit.

     The resurrection stories of Jesus’ physical body found in Matthew, Luke and John are legends and myths created four to seven decades after Jesus’ death and resurrection.  (Mark, the earliest gospel had no appearance stories but only a young man and an empty tomb.) They are stories created for the teaching purpose of the reality of resurrection but not literal history.  But the church quickly picked these up and created the doctrine of physical bodily resurrection.  However, this was not the doctrine of the early Jesus movement as reflected in Paul who wrote all of his seven New Testament letters years before any of the gospels were written.  If you stop and think about it there are so many ways that the resurrection into a spiritual body makes so much more sense than the doctrine of a physical resurrection. 

     The early Jesus movement was for a short while concerned about preserving Jesus’ teachings, sayings.  The earliest gospels, which we do not have copies of but we know they existed, were sayings gospels.  They were simply collections of Jesus’ sayings, teachings.  So for a short while, the movement’s main concern was following what Jesus taught. 

     But as the movement grew and became increasingly Gentile, the Church’s fellowship and discussions about the meaning of Jesus led to the development of stories.  Some of these were remembered and a good many were legend and myth developed to teach a good point.  The virgin birth and the bodily resurrection stories fit into this legend and myth category.  The only problem was not there legendary character but the church taking them as literal history instead of interpreting and emphasizing the point they were meant to teach.  In the ancient Jewish and Gentile world great leaders, heroes and religious figures were, after their death, given miraculous birth stories and sometimes an ascension into heaven.  Look at Samson, Samuel and Isaac’s birth stories.  Look to Elijah for an ascension story.  Then check out Seutonius’s biography of Caesar Augustus Who died about 14 BCE.  He was considered one of the greatest emperors in Roman history.  About 135 CE when Suetonius wrote his biography he gave him a virgin birth with the god Apollo impregnating Caesar’s mother.  Then Caesar died and was raised upon into heaven, at God’s right hand, with the title, Son Of God.

     The Jesus movement underwent many changes in the decades of the first century and beyond. It started, emphasizing following Jesus’ teachings.  Faith meant obeying what Jesus taught.  But faith soon came to mean believing certain things about Jesus, particularly about his divinity. 

     I am not concerned much about how divine Jesus was.  Because history shows me that those most concerned about promoting Jesus as God  have always been most prone to kill those who disagree with them and have done a lot of killing.  But a thoroughly human Jesus centered in God’s will promotes only compassionate answers to social and personal problems.  Him, we all can and should follow.  What you do about following Jesus way is far more important than what you believe about him.

     Christians are prone to think that the Jews always had a concept of a superhuman, divine Messiah who would come and rule on earth and set everything  right.  But this is not so.  Messiah simply meant an anointed one such as the kings, priests and prophets they anointed for service.  Now they did hope that each anointed one would be an especially good leader who would bring them into better times.  But a heavenly Messiah who would rule on earth destroying the wicked and exalting the righteous did not become a firmly established and longed for concept until after 63 BCE.

     What happened in 63 BCE that caused this concept of Messiah to become a passionate hope of almost every Jewish heart and was fervently expressed on so many Jewish lips?  It was Palestine being conquered in 63 BCE by the Roman General Pompey and becoming a province of the Roman Empire.  The independence won by the Maccabees in 167 BCE was gone and the heel of Rome ground heavily upon the Jewish people.

     In some ways Roman rule was beneficial.  King Herod, a protege of Rome, reigned in Jerusalem from 37 to 4 BCE.  He built the magnificent Temple which drew pilgrims for festivals and swelled Jerusalem from its normal 40,000 to over 200,000 people.  But for the main part the Romans were despised and some of their prefects such as Pontious Pilate (26-36 BCE) went out of their way to insult every Jewish sensibility that they could.

     In this very oppressive atmosphere Jesus lived and served.  Jews everywhere were looking for direct intervention by God and a Messiah ruling on earth in the Kingdom of God delivering them.  Jesus out right rejected this kind of Messiahship but many of his apostles and close followers did not and some of them injected this apocalyptic kind on Messiahship in the four gospels written between 70 and 95 CE.  I consider this view as harmful to wholesome Christian faith.  This view is called the apocalyptic Jesus which I assert Jesus was not.  This view of Jesus is expressed in what many Christians today believe is a coming literal 1,000 year reign of Christ on earth.  It makes for good comic books and sensational movies but very bad, unrealistic and harmful theology.

      This Kingdom of God coming physically on earth doctrine resulted in several catastrophic events in the first century CE.  A number of prophets tried to mobilize the population to revolt.  These revolts can be seen in Josephus’ writings, The Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities, and in Acts 5:36-37.  Then there was the prophet called the Egyptian who convinced thousands of Jews to gather on the Mount of Olives to storm the provocatively placed Roman fortress which stood beside the Temple.  All of these revolts were totally destroyed and came to nothing.

       John the Baptizer whose ministry began in the 20’s CE was an apocalyptic prophet.  He drew large crowds to the Judean Desert but he did not preach revolt, rather repent and get ready for the coming Rule of God (Matt. 3: 1-2).  The Jews were to prepare for the coming judgment by turning from their sins, being immersed in the Jordan River and vowing to live a blameless life.  Though John did preach against Roman rule, Rome executed him probably because they feared his large crowds would turn into a revolt.

     John was a cousin of Jesus and Jesus followed John’s movement for a short while but he soon broke from John because he was not an apocalyptic like John.  John was a repent for the Judgment is coming down and it will all end soon.  Jesus was a live in the moment and make the best of the moment Messiah.  He said repent also but along with that discover the Kingdom or Rule of God within yourselves.  Make the most of the culture and time you have and by loving, cooperative, inclusive fellowship work to reform your culture, society, nation and church now of its injustice to people.  “Seek first the Rule of God and its justice and God will add unto you the other things of life that you need.”  (Matt. 6: 34).

     Jesus was deeply opposed to the apocalyptic view of the Christ and the end of the world apocalyptic theology that looked for a supernatural destruction of all the wrong and exaltation of all the right and every problem being solved all at once.  This is a doctrine of lazy and often angry men.  Jesus then and now wants us to work for God’s justice to be implemented in our human society and keep hoping for a brighter tomorrow.  Today is the only time we have to serve and love God and our fellow man.  Today, through practicing the way of Jesus we can build ourselves and others up for participation for the life that comes after this life.  Preaching various supernatural end of the world scenarios in which our little group is saved and all else destroyed is always been found to be self destructive and self defeating throughout history.  Look to Jesus and live and do right now!