When the author enters his own story
Photo by Chris Lawton
Who is Jesus? There are many things we could say to answer this question, but I want to focus on just one idea here, in case you aren't familiar with this data point. It's actually the data point that Christmas is all about (I know it's not Christmas yet, but this point is worth emphasizing).
First of all, Jesus is God. Secondly, he is a man, a human being. He is 100% God and 100% man at the same time. Not a 50/50 demigod, but 100/100 God and man. He is one of us, and he is also God.
Here is another way to think about it. Jesus is the author of the story of the world, and he entered his own story. He did this because the characters in his story rebelled against the author and started following the villain in the story instead. To save not just the story but also the characters, the author entered the story.
How cool is that?!
And he did it in such a strange, upside-down way. He was born into the world as a real human baby. A young woman miraculously became pregnant, gave birth to him, and raised him. And he grew up to become a man.
Now here is the most important piece of this story: The author wrote himself into the story to be born to die, not a natural death, but an awful execution. Some of the characters in our story hated their own author so much that they had him killed. But then he wrote himself back into the story by coming back to life.
He did this to destroy the villain’s power and make a way for the characters to defect from the villain’s kingdom and re-enter the author's kingdom instead.
Jesus is God who became a man in the middle of history to be killed so he could defeat death and save us so we could come back to his side of things for eternity.
If you're unfamiliar with this story, you can read it in the New Testament of the Bible, specifically the first four books of the New Testament called Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But it is elsewhere, like 1 John chapter 1, and Hebrews chapter 1. And even in the Old Testament, in places like Genesis chapters 1-3 and Isaiah chapters 7, 9, and 53.
