The Manifestation of Jesus

The 2025 political party conferences are almost over. I wonder how many times manifestoes were mentioned.

Obviously, the word manifesto comes out of the word manifest and means to publicly put forward a set of intentions, objectives and motives. I’ve always liked the sound of that word ‘manifest’, even the way it looks in print on the page!

After I became a Christian, I found that the word manifest was to become essential to my understanding of Jesus. Here is why.

The God of everything is a personal being but, as humans, we have no categories or capacity with which to understand and relate to him. In love, God condescended to come to us as a man, showing forth (or manifesting) his very self. In this way we could know and understand what he is like in human terms. When we ask, ‘So what is God really like?’ The answer is, ‘like Jesus’.

In light of this, has Jesus anything to say to the hopeless, those who are sad, the complacent, arrogant and proud? What about the unbelieving or those with just a little faith? What is his mind towards religious leaders who don’t actually feed those in their charge with true spiritual food? We can go into the four Gospels in the New Testament and see Jesus addressing these things and other matters, while being assured that what he says is perfectly in line with God. Jesus himself said, ‘I and the Father are one’.

We may say Jesus has a manifesto. He has a plan: a purpose in which his intentions, objectives and motives are all present. Central is his objective to fulfil the role of God’s Good Shepherd who, as foretold in the Old Testament, is intent on seeking out his lost sheep and saving them from ultimate harm. So dedicated to his sheep is Jesus, that he laid down his life and took the slaughter that otherwise would have befallen them.

How do we feel about being referred to as a lost sheep? If such talk offends us we will likely want to evade or hide from the things of God and so forfeit the good intentions that he has for us. Those who are glad and thankful to be found by him, can genuinely relate to the 23^rd Psalm that’s often sung at funerals, ‘The Lord is MY Shepherd…’.

Fundamental cause of our sufferings

Conservative Leader, Kemi Badenoch, has told the BBC how she lost her faith in God after reading about the abuse that Josef Fritzl inflicted on his daughter Elisabeth. He had kept her locked in a basement for 24 years and regularly raped her. Ms Badenoch said of Elisabeth, ‘She prayed every day to be rescued, and I thought, “I was praying for all sorts of stupid things . . . why were those prayers answered, and not this woman’s prayers?”’. As a result, her faith in God was extinguished ‘like someone blew out a candle’.

Does Christianity offer an explanation as to why some people are subjected to so much pain, heartache and suffering, whilst others seem to get by comparatively easily? No, but it does offer a different perspective and answers deeper questions.

Generally, our world-view is that this life is all that there is and we need to enjoy it as best as we can. We are tempted to feel short-changed when our felt needs and our hopes are frustrated. How much worse when real pain and suffering come to our door and enter in.

The perspective that God presents to us is of a different order, one outside our natural mindset. Nevertheless, for many of us it isn’t something that we are unfamiliar with – it’s what the Scriptures say (Genesis chapters 1-3).

‘Sin’, i.e. rebellion against God, entered the world. The creation that God originally made as ‘good’ is thereby broken. Critically, the people he originally made as ‘very good’ are also broken and the result is that we each know suffering and death.

God has not remained aloof nor is he powerless to rescue us from our predicament: He entered into our situation personally by becoming a man - the Son of God, Jesus. He knew rejection, sorrows, grief, betrayal, pain, suffering and death to a depth that no one else has. Why?

On our behalf, Jesus was paying the ultimate penalty for our inbuilt bias that steers us from God and all of the wrong thoughts, words and actions that flow out of this. God loves us so much: He gave Jesus his most precious Son so that whoever entrusts themselves to him will not be lost when this life ends but will have new and eternal life. God himself ‘will wipe every tear from their eyes’; no more death, mourning, crying or pain.

War and Peace and God

On 15 August 1945, following the dropping of two atomic bombs, the Japanese government announced its surrender to the Allied forces. The formal surrender was signed on 2nd September. Months earlier, Germany had signed its own unconditional surrender. Going back 27 years before, we often think of the end of the First World War as being on the 11 November 1918 but this was an armistice. Technically that war ended in June 1919, with the Treaty of Versailles, when the Allies dictated the terms. If Germany had not accepted these terms, there would likely have been a resumption of hostilities. Happily, with these surrenders came peace.

Now to another sort of peace. On TV dramas we sometimes come across a character that has faced the fact that they are terminally ill and say something like, ‘I’m ready; I’ve made my peace with God.’ I guess this must happen in real life too.

Just as Germany and Japan were in no position to dictate terms by which they could be at peace with the Allies, so it must be remembered that when we want peace with God it has to be on his terms and not ours. To speak of ourselves making peace with God does rather imply that we lay down our terms and expect that he will be glad to accept them and have us as his friends. We need to guard against such delusions.

The first Christian teachers sought to show how each one of us, by nature, are enemies of God. We don’t like the idea of doing the things that God requires if they don’t coincide with our own desires. To be candid, we are in rebellion.

Our war with God is one we’ll never win and, if we will surrender, we will actually find him to be a magnanimous, divine Heavenly Father, not a harsh overlord. So what are God’s peace terms?

Some Jews once asked Jesus, ‘What must we do to do the works God requires?’ Jesus answered, ‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.’ On another occasion a non-Jew in desperate straits said, ‘What must I do to be saved?’ Jesus’ disciples told him, ‘Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved…’. We also are told to lay down our weapons, believe and trust in Jesus and then we will know peace with God.