There was a Man

A conservative estimate puts the overall historical world population at 108 billion: assuming that this number is even vaguely close makes the individual quest for uniqueness all the more difficult. In the time it takes to read this whole article there will have been 875 people born and around 367 will have died; we live in a crowded world with a population that is doubling every 35 years.

The many freedoms we who reside in the west enjoy are a relatively recent development, where even the concept of a weekend was unknown just 120 years ago in Britain. To have more than a Sunday free from work commitments was a dream that very few could hope for; still fewer outside of the gentrified classes had ever even thought that a holiday away from home was a possibility open to them.

Today, western teenagers want or even expect their ‘gap year’ to find themselves before settling down into a life of work. Most go on to trade their teenage ideological thinking for a wage from the corporate giants that so outraged them. The only remnants being a forgotten t-shirt with the revolutionary Che Guevara’s post mortem photo that gets stretched over a forty something’s expanding waistline when they realize that the years are fast running away from them. So where are the ‘individuals’ who stand out from the crowd? With China producing honors graduates as fast as it does iphones, and in numbers that are going to flood European and American companies leaving no places for our own meager outputs.

It takes a Steve Jobs or a Richard Branson to stand out from the crowd, even having a top degree or doctorate is no guarantee of anything; we are more educated and informed than ever before in history. We have access to more information and knowledge on our phones than a university student could learn twenty years ago; so where does that leave us? Destined to slog, save, underachieve and die like every one of our forebears? In short, yes! Most of us will go to work, raise families, go on the occasional holiday and live out our lives much the same as everyone else; that is how it is and must be for the world to function.

We have created a false world for ourselves where everyone is unique except those who dress differently, they are just weird! If I don’t have this car or that house, or go on these holidays I am in some way inferior. and yet we mass produce cars and houses that are identical in every way, we think we are edgy if we order the metallic paint option on our new car. If there are people out there living a subsistence life without the capitalist trappings in countries like Laos, then they can’t possibly be happy, and yet they are amongst the happiest most contented people alive.

There will and must always be leaders, good and bad; equally there will always be those who are led, good and bad. Poor men and women will rise to power and family dynasties will continue in power through connections and school ties. But what is it that makes a man different? With 108 billion to choose from, can one man really be that different and if he is, would I want to know about him?

There have been many people who have written about the man Jesus over the centuries, there are as many opinions as authors who have lifted pen, quill or keyboard; who should we believe? They can’t all be correct.

For me, we should always go back to first hand reports if they are available, in this case there were a multiplicity of eye witnesses; people of varying social, cultural, economic and religious backgrounds. Some believed, most didn’t during His lifetime, even His own family were divided in their opinions of Him. Regardless of what you or I may think this one man has divided people since His birth. Jewish nobility tried to have Him killed while eastern nobles traveled thousands of miles to worship Him with gifts.Shepherds were the first to proclaim His birth to a town, and a half dead priest prophesied of His life which would bring light to all nations but be an offence to His own people.

His own claims of deity caused the religious to lift stones to kill Him, He accepted worship that was due only to God and claimed equality with that God; things that are innocuous to our ears but abhorrent to those in His day. His followers died proclaiming Him as saviour, believing that He had changed their lives. In our own day men and women still point to Him as someone who brought light to their darkness and hope to their hopelessness.

If He is not who and what He claimed to be, He is a complete NUT!

If He is who who He said He is………..He is that one in 108 billion.

Philippians 2