“The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God.” Mark1:1

After nearly nine months of reading the Old Testament, we finally get to meet Jesus today! His presence has been part of everything we have read until now, but in the Gospels he steps onto center stage, goes into action and speaks to us.

We will read the story of his life as told by the Four Witnesses, Mark, Luke, Matthew, and John. Only Matthew and John were among the Twelve whom Jesus called to be Apostles.

Mark was a close companion of Simon Peter and, later, the Apostle Paul. He was very young when he started following Jesus, but he grew up among the people who knew Jesus best and recorded what he learned from them.

Luke was a Hellenic Jew, someone with a Greek education who also learned the stories of Jesus from the Apostles.  Luke was a doctor and very precise historian who took great pains to make his account of the life of Jesus as accurate as possible. He relied upon multiple eyewitness accounts and wrote everything down in an orderly way.

Many, many books have been written about “the historical Jesus,” but we are going to focus here on what the Bible says about him. The Bible has the most information about Jesus and it’s the primary source for almost every other book written about him, so let’s get all we can from reading about Jesus in this wonderful Book.

John’s Prologue

Mark has a straightforward, single-sentence introduction to his Gospel. Luke explains his process as a historian and dedicates his work to his friend Theophilus, which probably indicates that Luke had a Gentile audience in mind as he wrote.

John, however, begins his book with a deep contemplation of who Jesus Christ is. He goes back to a point before time began and tells us that Jesus is God, the Creator of all things.

John gives Jesus the name Logos, or the Word, because Jesus is God’s message to the world. He is the voice through which God speaks, the complete expression of everything God wants to say.

In Genesis, when God spoke – and said over and over, “Let there be . . . “ – it was Jesus through whom he spoke. Jesus was the Word at Creation.

“He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.” John 1:2-3

John’s Observations About Jesus

The first man to recognize Jesus as the Son of God was John the Baptist and he literally cried out when he saw who Jesus was. John the Baptist’s mission as a prophet was to introduce the Messiah to the world, so it was he who first saw God’s glory in Jesus. When he recognized Jesus as the Messiah, he directed other people to him.

Then John the Apostle saw the glory, too. He said,

“We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full grace and truth . . . For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.” John 1:14, 17-18

John said that in Jesus he saw divine light and that his light gave life to all mankind. There was no darkness in him and no darkness could ever overcome him. He came into this world as God in the flesh, and made his home among people. The world belonged to him because he made it, but the world didn’t recognize him.

John only wrote about what he saw, heard, and touched with his own hands. We can respect his account as one of the closest and most credible witnesses to the life and person of Jesus Christ.

The Genealogies of Jesus

Matthew and Luke both wrote genealogies for Jesus to demonstrate that he was the promised Messiah. Matthew began with Abraham and continued down through time to Joseph, the husband of Mary. Jesus was born into Joseph’s household and thus became his legal son.

Luke’s genealogy begins with Joseph’s generation and works its way back through time to Adam. Both genealogies include King David as the ancestor of Jesus, but there are some noticeable differences between them. If you are curious about these differences, here is a great overview of what scholars have discovered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YD-59b2CYQhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YD-59b2CYQ

The most important thing about Jesus’ family tree is that he was born into the royal line of King David, and that was one of the qualifications of the Messiah.

The Birth of John the Baptist Foretold

God said in Malachi that he was going to send one more Old Testament prophet who would announce the arrival of the Messiah.

“‘I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come,’ says the Lord Almighty.” Malachi 3:1

In Luke 1:5-25 the coming of that prophet, John the Baptist, is announced – before he is conceived – to his father Zechariah the priest.

Zechariah was a good man, married to a good woman. They were the right kind of people to raise a prophet, but they had to wait so long to become parents, they all but gave up on it.

Then an angel appeared to Zechariah at the temple and gave him the great news. Zechariah couldn’t tell anyone about it because God took away his voice, but his wife Elizabeth became pregnant and went into joyful seclusion to wait and see how the pregnancy would progress. By the time she emerged from seclusion she was able to feel a healthy baby moving around inside her.

The Birth of Jesus is Foretold

As Elizabeth headed into her third trimester, her cousin Mary was in Nazareth receiving baby news of her own. She had been chosen to give birth to the Messiah, the Son of God.

Mary was probably a young teenager when the angel Gabriel spoke to her. She was troubled by the unexpected appearance of an angel and confounded about how she could become a mother while she was still a virgin. But when she heard the conception would be the creative work of God through the Holy Spirit, she agreed to be part of God’s plan.

“‘I am the Lord’s servant,’ Mary answered. ‘May your word to me be fulfilled.’ Luke 1:38

Gabriel told Mary that her cousin Elizabeth was in her sixth month of pregnancy, a formerly barren woman with a miracle baby on the way. Gabriel assured Mary that God could do what he said he would do, “For no word from God will ever fail.” Luke 1:37

The stage was set; the Messiah was about to appear; and so far, only one person on earth knew about it – a young girl in a small town 100 miles north of Jerusalem.

This seems like a humble way to introduce the Messiah to the world, especially for those of us who just finished reading hundreds of promises and prophecies about him in the Old Testament.  But we also saw in the Old Testament how often God used individuals – sometimes the most unlikely individuals – to do the most amazing things!