Part 3: The Revolution Begins

To recap: Before there was the world, there was the war, the war between good and evil, the war to begin and end all wars. On one side there is the One, the Good, the Source of all light and life, the Creator of the universe. On the other side is the dark, the Great Enemy and his spirits.

The dark won their first victory when the world was barely born, plunging us into constant conflict. But hardly had this catastrophe occurred when the first prophecy, the first promise, came: that a champion would come and overthrow the enemy. And after thousands of years, he did come, not as a king or a warrior – though the blood of both ran in his veins – but as a humble peasant child named He-Will-Save.

He-Will-Save

Years passed, and the child grew into a man. The earth didn’t tremble when he walked; the trees didn’t bow to him; his eyes didn’t shoot fire. He wasn’t impossibly strong or breathtakingly handsome. For over three decades, hardly anyone noticed him. And then, one day, he set the world on fire.

He came like something from another world. He was not an everyman; when he spoke, he spoke with authority, revising traditional understandings, adding to sacred texts and clarifying prophecies. He was not an elite; he stood against oppression, upending social norms, correcting religious authorities and ignoring political ones.

He was not bound by any particular cause of his time; he lived by a rule all his own, speaking to a thousand contemporary concerns without being defined by any one of them. He was not a champion for his time; he was a champion for all time. The people loved him. The authorities hated him. No one ignored him.

His Mission

People think that He-Will-Save is important because he said a lot of nice things. But he didn’t. He didn’t come to give anecdotes and axioms; he came to take his place in a story, and if you look back at what he said in context, you will see why the authorities found it so disturbing. It revised all history, all loyalty, and all authority. This man retold the story of the world and defined both his and our place in it. But still no one saw the plot twist coming.

He-Will-Save might also have been called He-Will-Die; both were part of the prophecy from the beginning-time. And die the champion did, but not in battle. He was executed by the state as a criminal and a traitor. There was no fierce battle, no epic struggle to the death. He died without a fight – yet the earth shook and the sky thundered at his passing.

On the spiritual plane, you see, the greatest struggle the world had ever known was being waged. In the biggest mystery of all, the champion was none other than the One made flesh. When he died, death opened its gaping jaws and swallowed Life itself. But death, being the lack of life, ceased to be death when infinite life filled it.

The Death of Life and the Death of Death

And thus, with the death of the One, death was destroyed, and the prophecy was fulfilled. The seed of woman was struck a mortal blow, but the power of the enemy was crushed. The first demonstration of this was that the champion, his work done, arose in a new kind of life, a kind of life he offered to all the world, an immortal life.

So the world turned. In place of traditional strength, which bred weakness in its very birth, there was a weakness which turned out to be far stronger. In place of the straining for perfection, there was a brokenness that became beauty. In place of survival, there was death, but a death that brought forth new life. The pattern of history had been rewritten; the world could never be the same. It is fitting that we speak of this turning at the advent of the new year, for over the span of a weekend, in a little Middle-Eastern country, all things were made new.

The greatest struggle, the struggle that turned the first defeat into the final victory, had been waged and won. But the world remained imperfect. The stories of the promised one coming to set everything right, to bring peace and prosperity to all the earth, to end war and bloodshed and evil forever, were unfulfilled. He-Will-Save left the earth – but he promised to return.

There are prophecies yet to come. And so our story continues.

“Empty Tomb 2 (K)” by kodi_tanner is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0 CC BY-ND 2.0