It’s easy to get Jesus wrong. You could consider Him just a wise teacher, gentle prophet, or worse, a mere man. You could limit Him in your thinking to the 33 years of his life and try to hold His influence to those narrow boundaries.
But Jesus won’t stay in the small enclosure you built for Him. No, He is King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the great I Am, the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, He is the coming King and Messiah (the promised one) whose arrival is foretold by the Old Testament prophets.
Understanding the implications of Easter, requires an understanding of exactly who Jesus of Nazareth was and is. According to the gospel of John, He was in the beginning with God, co-equal to God, part of the trinity (Father, Son and Holy Spirit).
So what was God doing living as a man in a remote village outside of Jerusalem in the first century A.D.?
God became man to solve man’s problem, because man was eternally separated from God by his sin, and the only way to change man’s future, so he could be in communion with God, was for a man to live a perfect life, fulfilling all the requirements of God’s law, and to then give up that perfect life in sacrificial offering for the sins of all the other men who lived and would live. That is what Jesus did for me, for you, for the whole world.
“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” John 3:16
He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world. 1 John 2:2
