Category: Who is Jesus Christ

Before Jesus returned to heaven, He made sure the world knew He was truly alive. Paul later wrote that after His resurrection, Jesus appeared to Peter, then to the twelve, and “then He appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time” (1 Corinthians 15:6), most of whom were still alive when Paul wrote it, meaning anyone could go ask them. This wasn’t a rumor whispered by a handful of grieving friends. Hundreds of people saw Him with their own eyes.

Forty days after the resurrection, Jesus gathered His disciples one final time. He gave them a mission, told them to wait in Jerusalem for what was coming, and then “He was lifted up while they were looking on, and a cloud received Him out of their sight” (Acts 1:9). The disciples stood there staring at the sky until two angels appeared and gently redirected them, promising Jesus would return one day the same way He left (Acts 1:11).

Before He went, He made them a promise. He wouldn’t leave them alone. “I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, so that He may be with you forever” (John 14:16). The Holy Spirit would come, not as a replacement for Jesus, but as His continued presence, living in every believer from that point forward. Paul later described this same Spirit as a guarantee, a down payment on everything still to come (2 Corinthians 1:22). Jesus left the earth, but He didn’t leave His people.

All of this circles back to why any of it happened at all. God became a man, lived among us, taught us how to love, healed the sick, and then willingly died on a cross to pay for sins none of us could pay for ourselves. He didn’t have to do any of it. He chose to, because “God so loved the world” (John 3:16). The resurrection proved He’d conquered death. The ascension confirmed His work on earth was finished, and heaven welcomed Him back as King.

That’s the story this whole section has been telling. A king who came quietly, in a manger, in an overlooked town, to an overlooked couple, and who left having done exactly what He came to do. He’s coming back one day. Until then, He hasn’t left us alone.

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Three days after Jesus died, a group of women went to His tomb early in the morning, carrying spices to anoint His body. They expected grief, not a miracle. Instead, they found the stone rolled away and the tomb empty. An angel met them there and said, “He is not here, for He has risen, just as He said” (Matthew 28:6). The women ran to tell the disciples, though at first the news sounded like nonsense to men who had already given up hope.

Grief had scattered the disciples. With Jesus dead, many of them assumed His ministry had died with Him, and some went back to the only life they knew. Peter and several others returned to fishing, back to their nets, as if the last three years had been a dream that ended too soon (John 21:3). They had watched Him die. As far as they understood, that was the end of the story.

But Jesus began appearing to them, alive, and even then, recognition didn’t come easily. Two men walking to Emmaus spent hours talking with Him, yet “their eyes were prevented from recognizing Him” until He broke bread with them (Luke 24:16, 30-31). Mary Magdalene mistook Him for a gardener at first (John 20:15). Grief and disbelief had a way of clouding what should have been obvious.

Once the disciples understood what they were actually seeing, everything changed. Every trace of doubt that had crept in during those dark days vanished. These same men, who had scattered and hidden out of fear, became bold enough to preach openly and eventually die for what they now knew to be true. A dead movement doesn’t behave that way. Christianity didn’t fade after the cross. It exploded.

Paul later explained why this moment matters so much for every person, not just the disciples who witnessed it. Death entered the world through one man, Adam, but life came through one man too. “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:22). One man started death. One man ended it.

This is why the resurrection changes everything. It isn’t just a story about Jesus overcoming death two thousand years ago. It’s a promise of eternal life for anyone who believes in Him, “so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:16). The tomb was empty, and because of that, death no longer gets the final word.

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On the night before He died, Jesus gathered His twelve disciples for a Passover meal, a tradition His people had kept for over a thousand years, ever since God delivered them from slavery in Egypt through the blood of a lamb (Exodus 12:13). Jesus was about to become the fulfillment of that very picture.

Before the meal even began, Jesus did something that caught everyone off guard. He got up from the table, wrapped a towel around His waist, and began washing His disciples’ feet, a job usually left to the lowest servant in a household (John 13:4-5). Peter resisted at first, telling Him, “Never shall You wash my feet!” but Jesus insisted, and Peter relented (John 13:8). Afterward, Jesus explained why He’d done it: “I gave you an example that you also should do just as I did to you” (John 13:15). Even here, hours from His death, He was still teaching them what it meant to serve.

During the meal, He took bread, broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is My body, which is being given for you; do this in remembrance of Me” (Luke 22:19). Then He took a cup of wine and said it represented “the new covenant in My blood” (Luke 22:20). What had once been a meal remembering an old rescue became a meal pointing toward a new one, His body and blood, given once for the sins of the world.

The evening wasn’t only tender. Jesus knew what was coming. He told the men at the table plainly, “one of you will betray Me” (Matthew 26:21), and though the disciples were troubled, none of them suspected Judas, who had already agreed to hand Jesus over for thirty pieces of silver. Judas sat at that table, ate that bread, and still walked out to betray Him.

Jesus also turned to Peter that night with a hard truth. Peter insisted he would never abandon Him, even if it cost his life, but Jesus told him otherwise: “the rooster will not crow until you deny Me three times” (Matthew 26:34). Peter didn’t believe it possible. By the next morning, it had already happened exactly as Jesus said.

Even surrounded by a coming betrayal and a coming denial, Jesus didn’t rush out or grow bitter. He stayed at the table, shared the meal, and gave His followers something to carry forward long after He was gone, a simple act of bread and wine that Christians still practice today in remembrance of Him.

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On the night before He died, one of His own turned against Him. Judas, one of the twelve, betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver, sealing it with a kiss (Matthew 26:48-49). Hours later, Peter, who had promised he’d never abandon Him, denied even knowing Jesus three times before a rooster crowed (Luke 22:60-61). Jesus was arrested, abandoned by nearly everyone who claimed to love Him.

What followed was brutal. Crucifixion was designed to be slow and humiliating, and Jesus endured all of it: the beating, the crown of thorns, nails driven through His hands and feet, hours of suffocating agony on the cross. It remains one of the cruelest methods of execution ever devised.

Two criminals hung beside Him. One mocked Him, but the other, recognizing who Jesus truly was, asked to be remembered in His kingdom. Jesus told him, “Truly I say to you, today you shall be with Me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43). Even in His final hours, He offered mercy to a man who had done nothing to earn it.

Near the end, Jesus cried out, “It is finished” (John 19:30). Not a cry of defeat, but of completion. The debt for sin, all of it, had been paid in full.

This is grace: getting what we don’t deserve. This is mercy: not getting what we do deserve. And this is justification: being declared right with God, not because of anything we’ve done, but because of what Jesus did. Paul later wrote that we are “justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:24).

John summed up why any of this happened at all: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:16). An awful death, willingly chosen, so that we could be forgiven. That’s not something we earned. It’s something we simply receive, with gratitude.

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Of everything Jesus taught, nothing carries more weight than the words He gave from a Galilean hillside. Matthew devotes three full chapters to it, 5 through 7, more space than he gives almost any other teaching. Crowds had been following Jesus everywhere, drawn by the healings and the miracles, and “when He saw the crowds, He went up on the mountain” (Matthew 5:1), with His disciples gathering close around Him. What He said next became the clearest picture we have of what it means to actually live under God’s kingdom.

He opened with the Beatitudes, a list of blessings that turned the world’s values upside down. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3). Blessed are those who mourn, who are humble, who hunger for righteousness, who show mercy. Not the powerful or the self-assured, but the humble and the brokenhearted. This wasn’t how anyone expected a king to open His reign.

From there, Jesus dug into what real righteousness looks like, far beyond just following rules on the outside. He talked about anger, honesty, generosity, prayer, and worry, always pointing past the behavior toward the heart behind it.

Near the end, He gave a warning that’s easy to miss if you’re moving too fast. “Enter through the narrow gate… For the gate is narrow and the way is constrained that leads to life, and there are few who find it” (Matthew 7:13-14). Following Him was never meant to be the easy, popular road.

He closed with a picture everyone could understand. A wise man builds his house on rock, and when the storms come, it stands firm. A foolish man builds on sand, and the storms wash it away. “Everyone who hears these words of Mine and acts on them” is like the man who built on rock (Matthew 7:24). Hearing wasn’t enough. Jesus wanted it lived out.

Luke records a similar sermon in a different setting, sometimes called the Sermon on the Plain (Luke 6:17-49), a sign that Jesus repeated these core truths again and again, wherever people would listen. Some messages are too important to say only once.

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Jesus’s first miracle wasn’t dramatic. It happened at a wedding in Cana, where the host ran out of wine, an embarrassing problem in that culture. Jesus told the servants to fill six stone jars with water, and when they poured it out, it had become wine, “the best wine until now” (John 2:10). A quiet miracle, done without fanfare, but it revealed who He was from the very beginning.

From there, the miracles multiplied. He healed the blind, the lame, the deaf, and the leprous, often with nothing more than a touch or a word. When two blind men asked for mercy, He touched their eyes and said, “It shall be done to you according to your faith,” and immediately they could see (Matthew 9:29-30).

One evening, a crowd of thousands had followed Him into the wilderness with nothing to eat. His disciples had five loaves and two fish, barely enough for one family. Jesus took the small offering, gave thanks, and fed five thousand men, plus women and children, with baskets of food left over (Matthew 14:19-20). Scarcity became abundance in His hands.

Later that same night, His disciples were crossing the sea by boat when they saw Him walking toward them on the water itself. Peter, in a moment of bold faith, stepped out of the boat too and walked toward Him, at least until fear got the better of him (Matthew 14:29-30). Even the wind and waves obeyed Jesus.

He also raised the dead. When His friend Lazarus had been in the tomb four days, Jesus called out, “Lazarus, come forth,” and he did, still wrapped in his burial cloths (John 11:43-44). Death itself answered to His voice.

But the greatest miracle of all was still ahead. Jesus willingly died on a cross to pay for the sins of the world, and three days later He rose from the dead, defeating death for good. Paul later wrote that God “raised Him from the dead” (Romans 10:9), a miracle that belonged to both Father and Son, two persons of one God working as one. Every healing, every feeding, every wonder pointed toward this: a King who could conquer death itself, and did.

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Jesus came for more reasons than people expected. He came to teach, to heal, and ultimately to die for the sins of the people He came to save. He said it plainly: “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). Everything else He did during His three years of ministry flowed out of that purpose.

He taught constantly, and love sat at the heart of it. He told His followers to treat others the way they wanted to be treated (Matthew 7:12), and He warned them against judging people harshly, since “in the way you judge, you will be judged” (Matthew 7:2). He praised humility over status, telling His disciples that whoever wanted to be great among them had to become a servant (Matthew 20:26). His words in the Sermon on the Mount capture so much of this, though that teaching deserves its own deep look elsewhere.

Jesus didn’t work alone. He gathered men and women around Him, people willing to carry His message of faith, grace, and mercy long after He was gone. He sent them out to do what He was doing, to bring the same good news to others (Luke 9:1-2). His ministry was never meant to end with Him.

He also healed people, and not just physically. He restored sight to the blind, strength to the lame, and He healed hearts too, telling a woman caught in her sin, “Go your way, and from now on sin no more” (John 8:11). He came for the brokenhearted just as much as the sick, saying He came “to heal the brokenhearted” (Luke 4:18).

And He never came to throw out the law. He said so directly: “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill” (Matthew 5:17). He wanted people to get past empty rule-following and back to the heart behind the rules, a relationship with God rather than a checklist.

There’s far more to His ministry than one article can hold, but this much is clear: everything He did pointed people back toward God.

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Jesus rarely gave straight answers. Ask Him a question, and He’d often respond with a story instead, one that made you think rather than simply agree. “He did not speak to them without a parable” (Mark 4:34). A parable about a lost sheep, a lost coin, a wasteful son who came home. Simple stories about ordinary life, yet each one carried something eternal underneath. Jesus explained why He taught this way: to those willing to listen closely, “the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven have been granted” (Matthew 13:11). To those who weren’t, the stories stayed just out of reach, a puzzle worth wrestling with rather than a lesson handed over for free.

Love sat at the center of everything He taught. When a religious expert asked which commandment mattered most, Jesus gave him two: love God completely, and “love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39). Not an abstract idea. A daily practice. He told His followers to love even the people who made that hard: “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44).

Forgiveness came up just as often. When Peter asked how many times he had to forgive someone, wondering if seven times was generous enough, Jesus told him “not up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (Matthew 18:22). Not a math problem. A way of saying forgiveness shouldn’t have a limit at all.

He was also patient with people who were slow to understand. His disciples missed the point more than once, misunderstood His parables, argued about who was greatest, and Jesus stayed with them through it. He didn’t walk away from Nicodemus when he came at night full of questions (John 3:1-2). He didn’t dismiss the woman at the well because of her past (John 4:7-26). He met people where they were and gave them time to catch up.

Jesus taught in a way that stuck. Not through lectures people forgot by morning, but through stories, questions, and patience that gave people something to carry home and turn over in their minds for years. That’s still what happens today, whenever someone reads His words for the first time.

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Jesus didn’t build His movement with religious scholars or men of influence. He walked along the Sea of Galilee and found fishermen instead. Simon Peter and his brother Andrew were casting nets into the water, doing the only work they’d ever known, when Jesus called out to them: “Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men” (Matthew 4:19). No résumé. No interview. Just an invitation, and they left their nets right there on the shore.

A little further on, He found two more brothers, James and John, sitting in a boat with their father, mending nets. Jesus called them too, and “they immediately left the boat and their father, and followed Him” (Matthew 4:22). These weren’t small decisions. A fishing business back then meant family, income, and identity all tied together. They walked away from all of it in a moment.

Over time, the group grew to twelve. Jesus chose them Himself, deliberately, “so that they would be with Him and that He could send them out to preach” (Mark 3:14). This wasn’t a random gathering of followers. It was a handpicked team, chosen for a purpose bigger than any of them understood yet.

Their names tell you everything about how God works. Matthew was a tax collector, a man most Jews despised as a traitor working for Rome. Simon was called a Zealot, likely connected to a group that wanted Rome overthrown by force. These two men, natural enemies by background and belief, ended up walking side by side. Peter, impulsive and outspoken. Thomas, cautious and skeptical. Judas Iscariot, who would later betray Him. Twelve very different men, flawed in different ways, chosen for the same mission.

Luke tells us Jesus didn’t rush this decision. Before naming the twelve, “He went off to the mountain to pray, and He spent the whole night in prayer to God” (Luke 6:12). A king was building His inner circle, and He wanted His Father’s guidance before He did.

These twelve ordinary men would go on to change the world. Not because of who they were, but because of who called them.

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Around two thousand years ago, in a small town called Nazareth, a young man named Joseph fell in love with a woman named Mary. Joseph came from the royal line of King David, though by then that name carried more history than power. He and Mary were ordinary people. No wealth, no status, nothing that would catch the world’s attention.

But God had been planning this for centuries. Long before Joseph and Mary were born, Isaiah wrote of a King who was coming, one whose reign would never end: “For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us; and the government will rest on His shoulders; and His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:6).

Then, while Mary and Joseph were still engaged, everything changed. God sent the angel Gabriel to Mary, and he told her she would conceive a son through the power of the Holy Spirit, not through Joseph. Mary was a virgin. She had never been with a man. Yet she believed him. “May it be done to me according to your word,” she said (Luke 1:38).

Not long after, Rome ordered a census, and Joseph had to register in his ancestor’s town of Bethlehem. So Joseph took Mary, now far along in her pregnancy, and made the journey. Neither of them likely understood that a pagan emperor’s tax decree was fulfilling a promise God had made long ago.

When they arrived, there was no room for them anywhere. Mary gave birth in whatever shelter they could find, and “laid Him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn” (Luke 2:7). The King the prophets had promised arrived not in a palace, but in a feeding trough.

That same night, shepherds nearby saw the sky open. An angel told them, “today in the city of David there has been born for you a Savior, who is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:11). The promise had a name at last, and it belonged to a baby in a manger.

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