John 1:1 says ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.’ (NIV) This places the word as the self-existent evidence of God’s creative power. The Greek word for ‘word’ is logos, which is where we get our word logic. The fact that science can discover the mind of the universe is one thing I think gets omitted from the conversation. But Sir Isaac Newton wrote many religious treatises, and his laws are based on the self-existent power of God in the word.

John goes on to say ‘the word was made flesh and made his dwelling among us.’ ( John 1:14 NIV) The word is in the person of Jesus Christ. As C. S. Lewis has stated, it is impossible to look at this man as merely a wise teacher. In Mere Christianity, he writes “Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse” (52). A close reading of the synoptic gospels has squarely located the person of Christ as the evidence of divine personhood in history.

Bright Eyes recent release Down in the Weeds Where the World Once Was, has a killer line “I read God is dead/ I shed some tears for Him/ But I swore on His grave I’d never do it again/ And I screamed when I realized what was happening/ that I had Good News.” ( “Dance and Sing”) This is the beauty of the gospel, that the sacrament of the eucharist gives us reason to celebrate. In fact, god was killed, but he rose again. And He lives in the hearts of everyone who has accepted him.

I’ve been watching churches on the internet and TV, and I can say, there are some good ones out there. Particularly, Revolution church in Canton, pastored by Jason Gerdes, is a a quotable and worthy one. Some of his sermons are available on YouTube. There is one moment in a worship song that really moved my heart. It was in the song Jesus You Alone where the female singer sings “You broke the curse for our freedom” (3:24). This is a theological point that is not easy to master.

Matthew 5:17 refers to the fact that Jesus came to fulfill the law, not to abolish it. In fact, Jesus kept the law perfectly, but all of our sin had to be dealt with. The cross shows how Jesus bore the penalty of all the ways in which mankind had failed to keep the law. There’s a great Crossway article about this. Thus, the penalty for salvation was his to take, which he took willingly. In truth, there is no other person quite like Jesus in history who fulfills the law perfectly. But he tries to instill our hearts with a new law: the law of love.

I know that the substitutionary sacrifice of Jesus Christ may be hard to grasp, but the spiritual law that guides our steps is one in which we must grapple with. There’s no shortage of spates of violence, ingratitude, and iniquity in our culture, but the healing power of Jesus is something that I cannot deny, nor completely grasp. But it has certainly made a difference for me.