LETTER TO MY MUSLIM FRIENDS - II

WHO IS JESUS

PART 1

“Seek the Lord while He may be found,

Call upon Him while He is near.” – Isaiah 55:6 (Bible)

This is a big, big question. Some people call Jesus a prophet; some call Him a great man of His time like Gandhi, Socrates, etc; and Christians call Him the Son of God and Savior of the mankind. I assure my readers that the information you are going to receive through this blog will surely interest, and also inform, you on the subject.

The angel that God sent to Mary, the Mother of Jesus, informed her about Jesus in following terms in the Book of St. Luke, Chapter 1:

“Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bring forth a Son, and shall call His name Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Highest; and the Lord God will give Him the throne of His father David. And He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of His kingdom there will be no end.”

Then Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I do not know a man?”

And the angel answered and said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Highest will overshadow you; therefore, also, that Holy One who is to be born will be called the Son of God.”

The angel calls Jesus the Son of God. He also explains why Jesus is the Son of God. The explanation about why King David is called His father is in the following discourse.

It is not difficult to understand that the children of men are bound to be men. In the same way, the Son of God is bound to be God! Son of God cannot be mere man! I will shed more light on the Divinity of Jesus in the course of this blog.

The next important information about Jesus is provided in the Book of St. John, Chapter 1, and Verse 1:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

The Word in the above-quoted verse is Jesus Christ Himself. Before He was birthed into this world, before even the universe and this world and all that is in it were created, Jesus was there. My Muslim neighbor found this verse extremely difficult to understand. He asked me how this could be? I made him understand the relationship between Jesus (the Son of God) and God (God the Father) in the following terms:

I told him, Bro. Alam, take a notebook and a pen and write down the word love on it. Now read it…Can you fail to grasp the meaning of the word love? He said, ‘No.” I asked him, “How is it that you cannot fail to grasp the meaning of this word? This is because this word love is actually born of the meaning that it conveys!”

“Now, Bro. Alam, here is another question for you, ‘The word love that you have written on paper actually exists on paper or between one person and another?” He said, “Between one person and another!” I said, “Right! But if it actually exists between them, then what it is that marks the paper?”

Bro. Alam looked at me confusedly. So, I explained to him further, “It is the word that objectifies the meaning. If the meaning cannot be objectified thus, then it will be literally impossible for us to express our love for one another. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary that the meaning is objectified by the word. And, that’s how the meaning and the objectified meaning have their places side by side. And, also, they are one and the same!”

Similarly, and this I’m saying to you, my Muslim friends, Jesus is the Word and He was with God and He was God. God created all things by speaking a Word. Jesus is the Spoken Word of God! God created all things through Jesus!

To put it plainly, Jesus was actively involved in creation of the universe and our world. In fact, Bible talks about Jesus having created ‘worlds’ and not just ‘world’. There are other worlds beside our planet earth. In due time, we shall know about it.

Coming to the point, the real import of what is being said hitherto is the Oneness of God the Father and God the Son. God the Father put the Word in the womb of Mary through the Holy Spirit, as it is stated in the paragraph quoted from the Book of St. Luke.

In other words, the Holy Spirit conveyed the Word to Mary’s womb. Jesus calls the Holy Spirit by the name ‘the Helper’. This Holy Spirit is the third manifestation of the Godhead! Or to put it the other way, we are not just talking about Oneness of God the Father and God the Son, we are also talking about Oneness of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit! At the same time, we are talking about three different persons through which God manifests Himself. One God, three manifestations of the same God…That’s what I am trying to explain.

In the Book of Isaiah, Chapter 53, my meaning is made a bit clearer. Here, Jesus is described as the Arm of the Lord (God the Father). And in the Book of St. Luke, Chapter 11, Verse 20, Jesus describes the Holy Spirit or the Spirit of God as the Finger of God. God created the worlds through Jesus and Jesus did everything through the Holy Spirit.

I am not talking about ‘three’ Gods; I am talking about ‘three manifestations’ of one God. Most of my Muslim friends have an issue with this concept of God. To them I have to ask a simple question, “Just tell me who we are? Let me quote Bro. Alam again here.

On one occasion he said we were not just body but also spirit. How very true it is! We are not just our body; we are also our spirit. But the Bible talks about three dimensions of our existence. We are not just body and spirit, we are also mind. So, we are mind, body and spirit.

Bro. Alam talked about the lust of the body fighting against the desire of our spirit to frustrate our spiritual aspirations. So, what he wanted to say was the clear division that existed between the body and the spirit. And both belong to the same person! How?

The answer to this question lies in the Book of Genesis, Chapter 1, and Verse 27. Here, we are told that God created Adam in His own image. Yes! Adam was created in God’s image. Though Adam was made from the dust of the ground, he possessed the Divine nature that reflected God’s image in him. That is the reason why Adam was called the supreme creation of God. Adam was His masterpiece. The three aspects (mind, body and spirit) in his personality reflected God’s image on human plane.

The reason why there was no contention between the body and spirit in Adam’s self was that Adam had not committed any sin so far and, therefore, his nature was not fallen. The clash between the body and the spirit began after the fall of Adam from the state that reflected God’s image. After the fall or after committing sin by eating the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the clash between the body and the spirit started. Therefore, the people who have a thing called conscience are bound to experience spiritual conflict in their life.

The point I am making is exactly this: Though there is a clear separation between our body and spirit and mind, they remain ours and together they define our self. Exclude any one of the three aspects of our self, and we lose the wholeness of being. That exactly is the reason why God’s plan for the salvation of the mankind touches all the three aspects of our being. Different aspects of our being do not make us three different persons; rather they are three different manifestations of our self.

So, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit are One. Therefore, on one occasion Jesus told people around Him, “I and My Father are one.” (See John 10:30)

Hebrews 1:1-4 offers more information about Him:

“God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds; who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become so much better than the angels, as He has by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they.”

His coming into the world in flesh and dying on the cross were intended to destroy the image of the sinful man and restore the image of God in man so that his connection to death is severed and his relation to God and life is established again.

This is not as easy to understand as it is said, and, therefore, I think, it requires some explanation. Again, the dynamics of language comes handy to explain the Word taking on flesh and suffering in flesh to the extent of death.

We have only to ask few simple questions: Why there is word? Well, it’s there to build up language and through language communication. Communication is needed to help us declare that we are very much there. It helps us express who and what and why we are and what do we want. Word passes between two or more individuals to complete the communication. One person needs to convey his meaning through words and the listener/s is supposed to understand them…and respond.

If one doesn’t speak, another can’t hear nor understand anything. It doesn’t build communication. Speaking a word is equivalent to the speaker taking on the flesh of meaning that the opposite person can grasp with his senses.

Similarly, it was necessary for the communication between God and men open again. That communication was there at first but Satan introduced a foreign language which mankind picked up. God was talking in the language of life and righteousness but man lost touch with that language and began to talk in a meaningless language of sin and death, wreaking havoc of the whole creation.

In order to have the communication between God and men start again, it was absolutely necessary that either mortals die or the language of sin and death dies. The former solution isn’t viable since God and mankind can’t be reconciled in death. As it is stated earlier, God is the God of life, not of death. So, only the second option remains.

God found out a very unique solution by presenting life and righteousness in flesh which is a signifier of sin and death to the mankind. That’s why mankind failed to read God’s righteousness and life. They only saw Jesus as man.

But God has His own way to make us understand His designs. He knew this all too well that the moment the signifier of sin and death (that is, the body of flesh and blood) was removed on the cross, and when the life and righteousness emerged victorious from the realm of death and darkness (through resurrection of Jesus), mankind would be able to see this light.

That is the reason why He gave the image of man to His Word in the same way that the First Man (Adam) was formed in His (God’s) own image. Just as the first man, modeled on the image of God, remained man and not God, the Word (or Jesus) taking on the image of man, remained God, and therefore, referred to as God-man.

The moment the image of Man was destroyed on the cross, the mankind (that would accept Jesus) lost the image of man which it came to acquire when the first man (Adam) fell by committing sin. But still it wasn’t possible for the mankind to recognize the God whom they mistakenly considered to be a man who claimed to be God by claiming to be the Son of God. It was must for Jesus to return to life after death and ascend to God the Father. His resurrection fulfilled this verse from the Book of John, Chapter 1, and Verse 5: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

Those who accept Jesus have the light and that light is the life for them. Jesus restores life to them. Just as by the first man (Adam) the whole mankind became sinful and died, through Jesus the whole mankind attains to righteousness and eternal life. That is the reason why Jesus is called the Last Adam in the Bible. (See 1 Corinthians, Chapter 15, and Verse 45) God wants the Last Adam to be worshipped. Satan had refused to worship the Last Adam (Jesus). All who refuse to worship Jesus follow in the footsteps of Satan and, therefore, will ultimately meet with the same fate that is Satan’s.

The reason why we need to worship Jesus is that it is by worshipping Jesus that we worship the one true God. Nobody (after the Fall of Adam) has ever seen God; therefore nobody actually knows God. The only way we can know God is through Jesus. One of the most quoted verses spoken by Jesus is this: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.”

The question is: Do you want to know God? Knowing God is the ultimate knowledge. No other knowledge is greater than the knowledge of God.

Before I conclude, let me assure you that in my next letter, I am going to bring you more revelation about Lord Jesus.

BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR:

https://www.amazon.in/Bertrand-Hatia/e/B00W7E3BEO/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0