Christ is our champion. No one in the Christian faith can doubt that. It is in the very name we name ourselves. We are known as the ones who follow Christ, literally, Christ-followers.
Yet, Jesus wore human flesh. He was a baby, a toddler, a preadolescent, a teenager, and a young man. The chemical processes that operate in our bodies (sometimes driving us to distraction) operated in his. He was hungry, experienced emotions, and enjoyed interacting with people.
It was only when he was 30 that he began his ministry. Luke 3:23 tells us:
“Jesus, when he began his ministry, was about thirty years of age, being the son (as was supposed) of Joseph…”
In Jesus’ day, surviving childhood was a milestone. The average lifespan was 35, but if a person reached that age, they were hardly old and were likely to live to 65-70.
Did Jesus throw away 12 years of ministry opportunity? If he had started at 18, couldn’t he have reached so many more people before his death at the hands of the Romans?
Those 12 years were a time of training and revelation to those who would carry on his ministry. John 21:1-25 begins with this passage:
“After this Jesus revealed himself again to the disciples by the Sea of Tiberias, and he revealed himself in this way. Simon Peter, Thomas (called the Twin), Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his disciples were together. Simon Peter said to them, ‘I am going fishing.’ They said to him, ‘We will go with you.’ They went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing. Just as day was breaking, Jesus stood on the shore; yet the disciples did not know that it was Jesus…”
Jesus wasn’t in training. His disciples were. They had to know and trust the man in whom they believed, or else all he had taught them would collapse under the weight of the world’s unbelief.
Let’s skip ahead several thousand years and read this verse in Revelation 20:10:
“And the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.”
We might be tempted into thinking this describes the devil’s day of desolation, but we would be oh, so wrong. The devil’s day of desolation came at the crux of history thousands of years earlier.
John 1:14 paints the picture the devil will remember for all eternity as the day his downfall began:
“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
The devil’s day of desolation began in a manger one cold night as a baby, bedded in straw, drew his first breath and gave his first cry. With Jesus on the scene, the devil’s end was assured, written in stone, and a foregone conclusion.
The devil’s day of desolation rocked his world, and not in a good way.
We already know the end of the story. Jesus rules and the devil drools.
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