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“You should search the Bible,” Ellen G. White writes, “for it tells you of Jesus. As you read the Bible, you will see the matchless charms of Jesus. You will fall in love with the Man of Calvary, and at every step you can say to the world, ‘His ways are ways of pleasantness, and all His paths are peace.’ You are to represent Christ to the world. You may show to the world that you have a hope big with immortality”—Life Sketches, p. 293.
With Jesus at its center, Christianity is among other things a historical religion, meaning that it revolves around a person whose life and work are amenable to historical study and analysis. Yet, at the same time, we cannot circumscribe Jesus Christ within the confines of history. For the reality of His person is supra-historical (above history)—there’s a point beyond which historical analysis cannot probe. History cannot take us into the mysteries of salvation, or into the wonders of what Christ’s death offers the world. For all that history offers, it cannot begin to fathom what Ellen G. White called “a hope big with immortality.”
This quarter centers on Jesus, on who He was, on what He taught, on what He did—and on what He is doing now. That last clause, “on what He is doing now”, makes all the difference in the world. It is what might be called “the mystery of the present tense,” a crucial element that distinguishes Jesus from every other historical figure, for what other historical figure, no matter how great, is doing anything for us now?
Who was this amazing Jesus? What was He like? What did He do while here? What is He, indeed, doing for us now? And finally, why should He be a concern for people in the twenty-first century?
The answers, as we will see, are far from academic. On the contrary, they affect the destiny of every human being.
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