Tareva - Week 9

Another outside reading that I'd like to blog about is a book called The Jesus I Never Knew by Philip Yancey. Again, another book that changed my way of thinking and my life in general. Yancey is a Christian journalist that decided to write this book to explore Jesus, as he is described in the Bible, without any preconceptions. Yancey's goal was to examine and define Jesus from a totally new perspective, divorced from the Jesus that society thinks they know so well. Yancey is quoted at stating, "No one who meets Jesus ever stays the same. Jesus has rocked my own preconceptions and has made me ask hard questions about why those of us who bear his name don't do a better job of following him."

The entire book is thrilling, new, fresh, and true. Yancey has a way of writing that reflects that simple nature in which he thinks about Jesus, the Gospel, and religious culture in general. I think that Yancey does an awesome job of offering his readers a new way of considering Jesus. I walked away from the reading feeling like Jesus is more real to me now. Yancey also managed to "break Jesus down" in a manner that makes Jesus seem human, just like us, instead of the way people tend to think of Jesus as this figure who is so much more great than we are so we'll never be able to relate to Him or communicate with Him appropriately.

Yancey includes a quote from Walter Wink that reads, "If Jesus had never lived, we would not have been able to invent him." When I read that part I felt like someone punched me in the chest. It was like, "HELLO!" that is so true! I believe that the power of God and Christ, and their genuine love for all things created stretches far beyond what humans can fathom. So, the idea here is that if we can't even really grasp all of God's power and might when He's made Himself known then there's no way we would have been able to even make Him up. People ask me all the time how I'm so sure in my faith and I usually say that there have been too many bad times in my life that worked out in the end for me to not believe that I'm being protected by a higher being. But after reading the passage concerning how humans would not even be able to invent God, I feel like I have a different answer to that question.