The year 30 A.D. John the Baptist is put in prison. Jesus fulfills His mission

The year 30 A.D. had started.

At the Passover feast in the spring Jesus and His disciples attended the festivities in the temple in Jerusalem. When Jesus saw that cows, sheep and pigeons were sold in the temple and that there were money changers in the building he drove all the tradesmen out of the temple with a whip that He had made Himself. After this some disciples remembered the Messianic prophecy: “The zeal for Your house will consume me”.

Shortly afterwards Jesus had a long discussion with a Pharisee. In the days of Jesus the Pharisees formed a religious movement which taught that a man could be saved by means of his own ability to obey the Jewish law perfectly. Jesus strongly disapproved of the movement and its advocates. He taught that people cannot be saved through their own achievements, but only through faith in the works of salvation of His Father and Himself.

In addition: the Pharisees were hypocritical: it was more important for them to seem great individuals in the eyes of their countrymen than to be considered righteous in the eyes of God. What was even worse: in their view their own traditions and their own opinions were more important than the rules and prescriptions of JHWH. When their own ideas did not agree with those of the Holy Scriptures they preferred to follow their own views to obeying the God-given laws.

As we have said before: shortly after the Passover celebration of the year 30 Jesus had a discussion with a Pharisee: Nicodemus.

In the course of the months it had become clear for everybody, including the Pharisees, that the central theme of Jesus’ preaching was the Kingdom of God. Nicodemus asked Jesus how people could enter this Kingdom. Jesus answered him that a person who wanted to enter the Kingdom of God had to start leading a completely different kind of life. In fact such a person would have to be born again. He or she should not be born through the flesh (the normal, physical human birth), but through the spirit. That means: anyone who wants to enter the Kingdom of God must have decided to let himself be guided by nothing else but God’s spirit, God’s thoughts, God’s will. Anyone who is prepared to live like this will receive power from God (also called God’s spiritual power or god’s spirit) which makes it possible for him to live in such a way that he can be accepted into the Kingdom of God that JHWH is going to establish.

In this conversation with Nicodemus Jesus also told him about the role that He played himself within the context of God’s Kingdom. He explained that he was God’s son, who had come to the earth to tell people about this kingdom and explain to them how they would be able to enter. He made it absolutely plain to the Pharisee that all people who had faith in Him and in His teaching would not be destroyed, but would live for ever. He emphasized that eternal life in God’s Kingdom was mainly a matter of faith.

The Bible does not tell us how Nicodemus reacted to Jesus’ words.

Later on Jesus and His disciples began to preach and to baptize in the same territory where John and his disciples were working. When John heard this he said again that he was not the Messiah, but that Jesus was and he also said that the extent of the work of Jesus would increase and the extent of his work would decrease. He again bore witness to the fact that Jesus was the Son of God who had been sent to the earth and that everybody who believed this would get eternal life.

Shortly afterwards John was arrested by Herod and put in prison because he constantly criticized Herod with regard to his immoral way of life.

Then Jesus and His disciples left for Galilee. On their way to Galilee Jesus and His disciples passed through a territory which was called Samaria. In those days Samaria was an area which lay between Judea and Galilee. The majority of the Samaritans were descendents of people of many nations who had been transported to Israel by the Assyrians after the destruction of the ten tribe kingdom in 740 B.C. Though in the course of the centuries many of them had married Israelites they were not considered real Jews by the inhabitants of Judea and Galilee. Neither in the political nor in the religious sense.

On His journey through Samaria Jesus got into a conversation with a Samaritan woman and, ignoring all Jewish prejudices, He gave her very serious instruction on the future Kingdom. Among other things He told her that in that kingdom all people would be equal. He also told her that only people with the right mental and spiritual attitude would be allowed to enter. When the woman told Him that she was looking forward to the coming of the Messiah who would give further information on the expected Kingdom, Jesus told her that He Himself was the Messiah. After hearing these words the woman went to all the people she knew in her town and asked them to go with her to the Messiah. Many of her friends followed her. Jesus then stayed in that town for two whole days to give instruction to the Samaritans. At the end of the two days many people were convinced that Jesus was the foretold savior. In the following two years Jesus and His disciples traveled all over Galilee and preached. In His preaching Jesus emphasized the fact that in the form of Himself God’s Kingdom had appeared among mankind. He called upon the people to repent of their sins, to develop a correct state of mind and, first of all, to have faith in Himself and His Father.

Jesus’ preaching was very successful. Many people believed in Him and His happy message. During an address in the synagogue of His birth town of Nazareth He demonstrated to the people that He was their foretold savior. Here, however, He met with fierce opposition from the side of His fellow-villagers, who reacted very aggressively and chased Him out of the village.

When He was walking along the shore of the Sea of Galilee one day (the Sea of Galilee is a large lake in the north of the country), He saw two fishermen busy with their work: Simon Peter and his brother Andrew. Jesus asked them to join Him and to become fishers of men. At once they abandoned their nets and followed Him. A little further on Jesus saw two other brothers at work, also fishermen. He asked them too to come with Him. They said goodbye to their father, abandoned their work, and followed Jesus on His tour of Galilee, which took a couple of years.

In this way Jesus got His first four apostles.

They entered Capernaum and in the synagogue of this town Jesus did something that He would do many times more in the following years: He threw an impure spirit (an evil, demoniac power which has taken possession of a human being) out of a demon possessed person. The fact that Jesus obviously had the power to throw impure spirits out of demon possessed people was accepted by many men and women in His days as a certain proof that He was the promised Messiah.

After this expulsion of an evil sprit Jesus and His four apostles visited the mother in law of Peter, who was obviously married. This woman was seriously ill and had a high fever. Jesus took her hand and healed her.

When it became generally known that Jesus could throw out evil spirits and cure the sick, His reputation and His fame greatly increased in Galilee. In addition large numbers of people accepted these abilities of Jesus to work miracles as a certain proof that He was indeed the promised Redeemer and the future king.

An, of course, in every town and every village that Jesus and His four friends visited large numbers of people took their sick relatives and their demon possessed acquaintances to Him. When at a given moment it turned out that He was also able to heal leprosy, the number of people that came looking for Him every day was so large that sometimes it all seemed to become too much for Him and now and then He withdrew to places where He thought He could be alone for a little while.

One day people who had a paralyzed relative wanted to take this relative to Jesus, but there were so many people surrounding the house where he was staying that they could not pass through the crowd. Then they hoisted the stretcher up to the roof, made a hole in the roof and lowered the stretcher with the paralyzed person on it to the place where Jesus was sitting. He healed the man with the words: your sins have been forgiven you. With these words He demonstrated two things which are of essential importance for all people who want to enter God’s Kingdom: sins can be forgiven and Jesus has the power to do this.

However, the scribes were very unhappy with Jesus’ assertion that He could forgive sins. They thought that with these words He blasphemed against God: only God could forgive sins and nobody else.

Shortly after this Jesus met a tax collector who was sitting near his tax-office: Matthew. He asked him to join His group of friends and the tax-collector became Jesus’ fifth apostle. In Jesus’ days tax collectors had a very bad reputation and everybody hated them. On the one hand because they forced the Jews to pay large amounts of tax to the Roman occupying forces, on the other hand because they often exploited their position of power by forcing the people to pay more than they were supposed to pay and put the extra revenue into their own pockets.

When, later on, Jesus ate a meal in the house of Matthew in the midst of many of Matthew’s colleagues and other people with a bad reputation, this fact in itself formed a certain proof for the scribes and the Pharisees that Jesus could not be the Messiah. They were sure that the true Messiah would not wish to associate with this kind of people.

Thus Jesus and His disciples traveled from town to town and from village to village. In every town and every village He addressed the people from the Jewish synagogues.