"Let me be transparent."

A thought by Erwin Raphael McManus, from his book, The Genius of Jesus (p. 20). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. (Click on the book title to go to Amazon to buy the book.)

This is good.

Erwin continues, "I fully believe in the divinity of Jesus and in the historical accuracy of all the scriptures. I believe God stepped into human history, took on flesh and blood, and walked among us, and that his name is Jesus. It doesn’t lessen my fascination with the humanity of Jesus. Neither does it diminish his genius."

He says, "If you are a person of faith, it may feel offensive to you to explore Jesus’s genius apart from his divinity. But I believe that we have for too long attributed all that Jesus did, and all that he was, to his divine nature. Other than convincing us of his divinity, I wonder, what can we learn from the Jesus who walked on water, fed thousands with only five fish and two loaves of bread, and healed the sick? Could it be that our fixation on the miraculous has blinded us to the transcendent?

He walked on water!

"Even when Jesus healed, it always had a deeper intention. He was never showing off. He was trying to change the way we see reality. When he healed a blind person, he spoke of our blindness and insisted that he came to give us sight. It was a metaphor wrapped in the miraculous—a way of getting our attention so we would know there was more going on than met the eye. Like a chicken transfixed on a singular object, we have yet to take our eyes off the spectacular and see the Jesus standing right in front of us."

He goes on, "In the end, he was not crucified for the miracles he performed. He was crucified because he violated the way people saw God, the scriptures, themselves, and the world around them. Jesus was by every definition a heretic. Yet one thing proves to be true over and over again. Once Jesus changes how you see reality, you can never see it the same again."

Erwin then says, "To fail to see Jesus as a man is to dismiss the complexity of his thinking, the brilliance of his ideas, the power of his character, and the beauty of who he was in full. I hope the pages to follow will change that oversight. Jesus is without question among the world’s great geniuses. More than that, I am convinced that Jesus stands alone above all the others."

And that is so true, isn't it? Yes, yes! #continuethought

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Just Continue That Thought...

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