God’s great sign visible to the whole world should have been unity among the disciples of Christ. Lack of unity manifests the lack of knowledge of God. Sadly the devil disrupted this unity. Today, many things divide humanity; color of skin, education, riches, relatives, selfishness, poverty; and many more
For any sinner to love God it must mean dependency on the cross for removal of sin and death by the gift of the Spirit. This in turn means having true knowledge of God from hearing and doing of the Word. So, as a disciple becomes knowledgeable in the Word and is thus instructed, this instruction develops into discipleship.
The disciples took more than three years to become capable of exercising the rule of grace in God’s Kingdom.They lived with Christ, heard, saw, and felt the divine power of grace as it worked among the people of Israel. The power and the exercise of the rule of grace (the Word), Jesus describes it as indeed it would affect every individual life, so that all would become one body of Christ with the same character/ behaviour.
Jesus reveals the worst sin (rejection of God) in the world. Sin in the heart is invisible and so is its ruler. The devil rules the world in a way that does not appear harmful to humanity. All our human senses have been sold to the world or to the devil. It is Jesus the Messiah who alone reveals the sinfulness of rejecting God in order to deliver us from our blindness, and all evil schemes of the devil; to a new life which starts here on earth – God’s Kingdom.
Jesus is God’s divine power of love, working as the light to the world, revealing the darkness and then seeks to remove this darkness by the same divine power through – “the Word”.
Law will not save us despite its wide existence in our world. The Apostles were people like us and Peter is a good example of any of us common folks today.
“Love” is the constant cry of God’s voice in the wilderness of the human heart. “Level up, remove the rocky patches, straighten up the crooked path – by my spiritual gift of love to you”, says the Lord.
During Jesus’ baptism, the spirit came down, as God’s divinely appointed proof that Jesus was the Messiah, the Savior. The same spirit is a gift from God to be received by every repentant sinner. The same spirit is the love of God poured into our hearts as a result of Christ’s work on the cross; this comes after our conviction of sin through the Law.
Christianity has given false comfort to the world. The word “Christian” was never used or defined by our Lord Christ. It was simply a label by pagans to refer to those who followed Paul in Antioch.
Luke CH 2:1-52
The extraordinary promises to the above, given the circumstances simply required faith – for no command, no ingenuity, no physical strength could bring about what had been promised.