God in flesh: Jesus

Hi people, I write again, today too I have something interesting to share. I will be talking from the book of Daniel of the Old Testament.

The story goes like this, the ruling king Nebuchadnezzar of the most powerful empire then Babylon, has a dream and he wanted to share it with only those who would be able to interpret it for him. To safe guard his dream the king decides that the interpreter should also know what the dream is without being told what it is, in order to determine the interpreter as genuine. his fortune tellers and magicians are of no help but only get the king more angry & so the king order the execution of all the members of the royal court as he had deemed them all useless. The king had 4 people from the tribe of Judah, in His court, these were Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah; men of God. Let’s read the scripture. Let us now read Daniel 2:31-45 to see how God makes Daniel reveal to the king, his dream with the interpretation.

Daniel 2:31-45 (Daniel speaking to king Nebuchadnezzar)

31 “Your Majesty, in your vision you saw standing before you a giant statue, bright and shining, and terrifying to look at. 32 Its head was made of the finest gold; its chest and arms were made of silver; its waist and hips of bronze; 33 its legs of iron, and its feet partly of iron and partly of clay. 34 While you were looking at it, a great stone broke loose from a cliff without anyone touching it, struck the iron and clay feet of the statue, and shattered them. 35 At once the iron, clay, bronze, silver, and gold crumbled and became like the dust on a threshing place in summer. The wind carried it all away, leaving not a trace. But the stone grew to be a mountain that covered the whole earth.

36 “This was the dream. Now I will tell Your Majesty what it means. 37 Your Majesty, you are the greatest of all kings. The God of heaven has made you emperor and given you power, might, and honour. 38 He has made you ruler of all the inhabited earth and ruler over all the animals and birds. You are the head of gold. 39 After you there will be another empire, not as great as yours, and after that a third, an empire of bronze, which will rule the whole earth. 40 And then there will be a fourth empire, as strong as iron, which shatters and breaks everything. And just as iron shatters everything, it will shatter and crush all the earlier empires. 41 You also saw that the feet and the toes were partly clay and partly iron. This means that it will be a divided empire. It will have something of the strength of iron, because there was iron mixed with the clay. 42 The toes — partly iron and partly clay — mean that part of the empire will be strong and part of it weak. 43 You also saw that the iron was mixed with the clay. This means that the rulers of that empire will try to unite their families by intermarriage, but they will not be able to, any more than iron can mix with clay. 44 At the time of those rulers the God of heaven will establish a kingdom that will never end. It will never be conquered, but will completely destroy all those empires, and then last for ever. 45 You saw how a stone broke loose from a cliff without anyone touching it and how it struck the statue made of iron, bronze, clay, silver, and gold. The great God is telling Your Majesty what will happen in the future. I have told you exactly what you dreamt, and have given you its true meaning.”

From verse 31-33, we see empires represented by gold, silver, bronze and iron. This goes without saying that these empire would have surely forced their rule on the nations subject to them. The statue in the dream is more like that of an amour, a symbolism of forced rule upon the nation. Today we may not have empires but we have economies and nations under enforced rigid rule. This today stands as that as that big intimidating statue in Daniel 2:31. In this article I would like to stress on the great stone that broke loose from the cliff without anyone touching it, this stone is said to crush elements of forceful rule on mankind & leave no trace at all of what it has crushed. This stone would represent a kingdom that will grow to cover the whole earth, a kingdom that will never be conquered & last forever.

Do you know that it is in the New Testament that Jesus is referred to as the corner stone, which is the most important foundation in the Kingdom of God, let us read for ourselves some scriptures on the same.

Luke 20:17-18 (Scripture from Psalms 118.22-23)

17 Jesus looked at them and asked, “What, then, does this scripture mean?

‘The stone which the builders rejected as worthless

turned out to be the most important of all.’

18 Everyone who falls on that stone will be cut to pieces; and if that stone falls on someone, it will crush him to dust.”

Act 4:11-12

11 Jesus is the one of whom the scripture says:

‘The stone that you the builders despised

turned out to be the most important of all.’

12 Salvation is to be found through him alone; in all the world there is no one else whom God has given who can save us.”

Romans 9:32-33

32 And why not? Because they did not depend on faith but on what they did. And so they stumbled over the “stumbling stone” 33 that the scripture speaks of:

“Look, I place in Zion a stone

that will make people stumble,

a rock that will make them fall.

But whoever believes in him will not be disappointed.”

1Peter 2:6-8

6 For the scripture says:

“I chose a valuable stone,

which I am placing as the cornerstone in Zion;

and whoever believes in him will never be disappointed.”

7 This stone is of great value for you that believe; but for those who do not believe:

“The stone which the builders rejected as worthless

turned out to be the most important of all.”

8 And another scripture says:

“This is the stone that will make people stumble,

the rock that will make them fall.”

They stumbled because they did not believe in the word; such was God’s will for them.

Note: – Zion was the place where God’s people went to worship El-Elyon (Most High God) i.e. El-Shaddai (All Powerful God) i.e. El-Olam (The Eternal God) i.e. El-Berith (God of the Covenant) i.e. El-Roi (God who sees me) i.e. JESUS: that people may believe and become a people of God (1 Corinthians 1:30)

From the above scriptures you can see Jesus is that foundation stone, whom powers of forcefulness will reject & stumble and be crushed (Luke 20:17-18). Salvation (Eternal life in heaven) can be found in Him alone (Acts 4:11-12). He is the One in whom you can securely place your trust, He will never disappoint those who believe in Him (Romans 9:32-33) [Romans 9:32//Prov 3:5 – Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding;]. People & nations will stumble in unbelief of Him (1Peter 2:8).

The catch in Daniel 2 is the reason the king’s magicians and fortune tellers give the king Nebuchadnezzar as to why telling him what the dream was without being told & then interpreting the king’s dream as well was impossible. Let us check the reason out in Daniel 2:10-11

Dan 2:10-11

10 The Chaldeans answered the king and said, “There is not a man on earth who can meet the king’s demand, for no great and powerful king has asked such a thing of any magician or enchanter or Chaldean. 11 The thing that the king asks is difficult, and no one can show it to the king except the gods, whose dwelling is not with flesh.”

Their reason to term the kings order as impossible in Dan 2:11 is that such is only possible of God, if he were to dwell as a human being, as you can see they were proved wrong & it goes deeper to show that God did dwell in human flesh and His name was Jesus.

John 1:1, 14, 17

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

…

14 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.

….

17 For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

The New Testament teaches us of a God, who not only does the impossible but His identity itself is what world finds impossible being fully God and fully man; God dwelling in human flesh. Monotheist may find this absurd as they appear to have unconsciously put limits on their god because what is impossible for them to even think about the same becomes impossible for their god. Belief in one god is not necessarily belief in Thee God, for belief is plainly known as trust & when you trust, it is normally with the intention that what you trust in, will work things out for you &  not the other way around, where you do works grab attention, indicating that even that one god is not alive because to that god the word belief is in what the people do for him and not what he does for them. The Bible teaches of God who worked out Salvation for all God’s people on the cross on purely the bases of belief/trust/faith (Romans 10:9-10; Ephesians 2:6-9), indicating Him to Alive. As you may have seen from Dan 2:10-11; the unbelief of the fortune tellers and magicians is what made them stumble, you can see that they denied the possibility of God in flesh & on that they stumbled even though they were the royal members of the court in the most powerful nation then. The same happen today to people, their unbelief in Jesus makes them stumble & their undoing unfolds in just a matter of time.

Romans 10:9-10

9 If you confess that Jesus is Lord and believe that God raised him from death, you will be saved. 10 For it is by our faith that we are put right with God; it is by our confession that we are saved.

Ephesians 2:6-9

6 In our union with Christ Jesus he raised us up with him to rule with him in the heavenly world. 7 He did this to demonstrate for all time to come the extraordinary greatness of his grace in the love he showed us in Christ Jesus. 8-9 For it is by God’s grace that you have been saved through faith. It is not the result of your own efforts, but God’s gift, so that no one can boast about it.