This, That & the Other

We're starting a study during our Worship services on the life of Christ. We're going through all 4 Gospels simultaneously and comparing what each author wrote about the different events in Christ's life and why some gospels includes certain events and others do not. This is completely fascinating. The history major in me loves it! It's so cool when you can look back over the big picture and see why A acted the way he did, which made B do such-and-such, and therefore caused C to happen.

The 4 Gospels were each written to very different audiences. This is something I had heard before, but it's fascinating if you think about it...

      ~Matthew's gospel is written to a primarily Jewish audience. He focuses on the Jesus as Messiah, King of the Jews, son of David and therefore Jesus' right to that title.
      ~Mark writes to Roman believers, emphasizing the servant of God. This identifies with his Roman readers who are slaves in Rome.
      ~Luke writes to the Greek. His emphasis in on the son of man, the perfect human, which is what the Greek culture would have sought after - a god-like status for man.
      ~John's gospel is the most evangelistic. He gives us the eternal concept about Jesus, full of grace and truth.

It is so cool that each gospel fits perfectly the need of each of its intended readers. God's hand is so completely in the writing of this, when I stop to think about it I am completely amazed at his thoroughness to clearly get the message of Jesus out. Another example of this that was brought out this past Sunday at church was in how Matthew and Luke begin their books. They both include the geneology of Jesus.

Since Matthew is written specifically to the Jew, he very clearly outlines Jesus' lineage back to Abraham and David. If this couldn't be proven to a Jew, then there was no point in trying to convince him that Jesus was the Messiah. Any Jew that knew the law, knew that for Jesus to be the Messiah, He had to be the fulfillment of the promise of God to Abraham (Gen. 12:3 and Gen. 17) and David (2 Sam 7:16) - that their households would endure forever, and that the throne of David would be established eternally. This proves that Jesus has the proper roots as the son of David.

Luke's geneology takes us back to Adam. Adam, the first man, who was tempted and failed. This proves that Jesus has the proper roots as the son of man and that would have been very important to the Greeks - to establish his humanness.

It all, to me, boils down to the fact that everything that I am looking for can be found and met in Jesus. No matter what my need, it is met in Jesus alone, not material things, not people, not schedules or accomplishment. God is good!

We had a good anniversary yesterday, although it was a fairly normal day - we haven't celebrated yet. Travis was going to take yesterday off of work, but he had been signed up for a training class for the day. We're going to spend Friday together as a family, and a good friend is going to come over for a few hours so we can at least go out to lunch and maybe a movie or something. We've been talking about buying bikes for our anniversary present for each other, too, so we may do some bike shopping.

Yesterday we also "celebrated" Noelle being 10 months old. :-) She can now be said to be officially walking and she is doing great at it! Well, she does have a small bump on her head where she fell against an end table, but it hasn't slowed her down at all. Her cousin is spending the day with us today, too, so that is encouraging her to keep up even more! She tried some egg this morning at breakfast and actually ate a few pieces this time. I do pretty good at coming up with stuff she can eat with us at lunch and dinner, but breakfast is hard at this point. She will eat fruit and Cheerios and toast, but I would like to try and get something with a little protein in her in the morning.