August 9

Jesus didn’t ‘sneak up on us.’ God incarnate did not enter the world He had created without giving specific insight into His purpose for coming. The scarlet thread of the good news of Jesus Christ, come in the flesh, crucified, and resurrected begins in the first pages of the Holy Scriptures and continues throughout. The Bible is a revelation of Christ and the power of His name.

Oh, yes, it is a history book and it is a literature anthology and it is a general ‘how-to’ of living life, but the focus of the entirety of its vast scope and depth is to apprise mankind of the One hope we have in a hopeless world, of the One salvation we have in a world that’s careening toward its destruction.

In Luke 4:18, Jesus declares, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me because He has anointed Me to preach the good news to the poor; He has sent me to announce the release of the captives and the recovery of sight to the blind; I am come to speak deliverance to those who are oppressed.” Who are the poor, but those devoid of the knowledge of salvation? Who are the blind, but those who cannot see truth? Who are the captives, but those who are bound by sin?

The Lord didn’t want there to be any confusion in the matter. When He declared in Genesis 3:15 that the Seed of the woman would crush the head of the serpent, this is exactly what He meant. He was assuring Adam and Eve and their progeny that the sin and heartache they had unleashed on the world would be totally overcome by Christ! Jesus was assuring fallen man that there is nothing of evil that will not yield to the power of His mighty, matchless name!