Suppose the Jews had believed in Jesus.—How different the outcome of their history would then have been! Instead of a bloody and hopeless revolt against the Romans, they might have found a way to live at peace with them, receiving from them a more just and humane government; Isaiah, centuries before, showed his people how to get along under the rule of Assyrians. Or, if the Romans had goaded the people to rebel, they might have fought and died gloriously, not merely for their own freedom but in the cause of all the suffering masses in all lands. Thus the whole course of history might have been changed. The four years' war which did break out in A.D. 66, about thirty-six years after Jesus' death, was not that kind of a war. In the course of these four years different factions among the Jews fought each other almost as fiercely as they fought the Romans. The Jews themselves were selfish in their hopes. They were not inspired and strengthened by Jesus' vision of brotherhood. In A.D. 70 the Romans captured the city of Jerusalem and burned the temple. It was never rebuilt. From that day to this the Jews have been a people without a native land.
Carrying Out the Ideas of Jesus
There was, however, after Jesus' death and resurrection, a splendid company of disciples whose lives had been transformed by their acceptance of Jesus as Saviour and Lord, and who were eager to go on carrying out Jesus' plans. None of them thoroughly understood these plans. Indeed, we are only beginning to understand them to-day. But very soon, within a few years after Jesus' death, the wisest of the early apostles, such men as Peter, Barnabas, and Paul, came to see that to carry out Jesus' wishes there needed to be a universal church in which Jews and Gentiles, men of all races, would be included. Within a half century branches of this new world-church had been started in every important city in the Roman empire. At first their meetings were held in synagogues of the Jews of the Dispersion; and it is a pity that all the Jews could not have perceived that these disciples of Jesus were carrying out the hopes of their own prophets, that this Christianity was simply Judaism fulfilled. But many, of course, wanted to keep their religion and their God to themselves as Jews. So there sprang up other buildings everywhere which came to be known as Christian churches rather than Jewish synagogues.
Our task to-day.—In these modern times we are still trying to understand what Jesus wanted and to bring it to pass in reality. We are beginning to see that if all men are indeed sacred to our heavenly Father, then under the leadership of our everliving Christ, a fight is in store for us on behalf of all the millions of our brothers who are blinded by selfishness, haggard from want, embittered by injustice, stunted in soul and mind by ignorance, or tortured by all the agonies of war. If there is to be a better world for any of us, it must be a better world for all of us. It must be "everybody's world."
Study Topics
1. Look up in the Bible dictionary, for further light on the background of Jesus' life, Galilee, Nazareth, Capernaum.
2. Read Matthew 4. 17. Explain why the message of Jesus, like that of John, awakened such a quick response among the people.
3. What did Jesus think of the rule of Rome? Read Matthew 20. 25-27, and Luke 13. 31, 32.
4. In contrast with the Zealots, what was Jesus' plan for winning freedom and happiness, instead of the oppression and misery of Roman rule? Read John 18. 33-38.