The Novel Gospel with Commentary: The Reintroduction of Jesus, for Newcomers, Skeptics, and Longtime Believers

By Jamaal W.M. Fridge

Have you ever shared the Gospel with someone, led them to Christ, and gave them a Bible to help them grow in faith? Have you ever worried that they would get lost in the Bible?

Have you ever wanted to know only the important details of the Bible's takeaway message? None of the unnecessary fluff, just the relevant story.

If you had only one go-to book that could explain the heart of God, what would it be?

The Novel Gospel shares the details of the life of Jesus, and all his teachings in chronological order, so that you don't have to go back and forth between the Four Gospels.

In addition, the commentary provides cultural and historical insights that aren't apparent in the text, so that you have a complete view of how people understood something that Jesus said or did at the time.

The Novel Gospel goes even further by providing the author's personal experiences with the texts in question, so that you can see what interpretations have and haven't worked in real life.

The Novel Gospel was originally a one-stop shop Gospel book for the author's friends in China, where the knowledge of God is not widespread. Eavesdrop on the conversation between the author and the Chinese, and you will see ways in which Western Christianity could stand to improve, as well as get a small peek inside the Chinese Church.

With the Chinese being a non-religious audience, The Novel Gospel was written as if the reader was an open-minded skeptic. It also empowers new or inexperienced believers to grow quickly in their faith. Lastly, it strengthens and challenges longtime believers with a fresh perspective on Scripture they may never have thought of before.

The author, Jamaal Fridge, is an African-American evangelist from the Southside of Chicago. He graduated with a Business degree from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI, and soon after went to become a teacher in Chongqing, China. Christian Outreach and Christian Education are his two areas of focus, as he wants to help people "connect the dots".

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jamaal W.M. Fridge
• Release date: Jan 9, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370174409

Jamaal W.M. Fridge

Jamaal W.M. Fridge is an evangelist from the Southside of Chicago. He graduated with a Business degree from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI, and currently lives in China, working as a teacher. Jamaal takes pride in Christian education and outreach, and plans to extend his efforts into video game design. He is already working on children's books that reflect stories from future games. Fridge places a high priority on creativity, and uses this character trait at every turn.

Book preview

Foreword

There were prophecies in the Old Testament that said that when the Kingdom of God comes, you won’t need anyone to teach you about God, and that no one will say, Know the Lord, because the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord, from the lowest person to the highest. That day has not yet arrived, so that means we have work to do. This book is part of that work.

When I came to China 3 years ago, I made many observations about modern Chinese life and culture. In China, the government is officially Atheist. They drove religion out during the Cultural Revolution about 50 years ago. While there have always been groups of Christians who met in secret, the society trended towards Social Darwinism, where the vulnerable were not protected, and the term human rights really meant national rights.

Following the death of Mao Zedong, the new leadership of China set the nation on an upward economic trajectory. Yet they neglected the cultural and spiritual foundation. So as people’s living standards improved, unchecked materialism sprang up. Money became a means of control and power. Since there is no spiritual or moral foundation, the country is now searching for its soul, wondering if and how their rich tradition might help them in this modern world.

It made me wonder how the knowledge of Jesus Christ might help them, but I was torn, because I felt like my country also needed to know Jesus Christ. Many might object and say America indeed knows Jesus. We even have federal holidays commemorating his birth (Christmas), death (Good Friday), and resurrection (Easter). However, I have to question if this is real spirituality, or just the baked in Western culture we’ve been raised in.

How much of our culture did we really get from the Bible? Was our gun culture inspired by Scripture, or by the Second Amendment? Is our American Exceptionalism attributable to God really blessing us, or because we came out of World War II virtually unscathed while the rest of the world was rebuilding? I pose these questions because we often assume in America that our ways are by-and-large God’s ways. We assume we have a connection with God that I contend is really not there. And I can prove it.

Last year, I ran a test on Facebook that is also on my website, novelgospel.net. On the test, I asked 10 questions about Jesus. Not the entire Bible, just Jesus. Our Savior. Our Lord. Some might say Our Best Friend. Some questions were tricky, while others were easy. (And by easy, I mean if you’ve read the 4 Gospels and absorbed a good bit of it, you would do quite well on the test.) The average test result was 37%, and most of the people who took that test professed to be Christian.

What does this say about Christianity in America? It says that this faith is widespread, but underappreciated and unexplored by many. It says that a lot of people know a few things about Christ, but are wrong more often than they are correct. It says that when many people speak about Jesus, they are speaking what they heard, not necessarily what they know. The impact this has is that when God’s people go out to preach the Gospel in America, everyone thinks they know the gist of it, and don’t pay it much attention. They think that as long as they pray and try to be good people, they think they’re all set to go to Heaven whenever that time comes. Except they’re not ready.

This phenomenon is called Biblical Illiteracy. It means people don’t know how to understand the message of the Bible, including Christians. This has created a bad reputation for Christians today. The world sees when we are not behaving as Christ would behave. Even when they don’t know the full details about Jesus, they have a reasonable approximation of what he would accept, and they see our bad behavior for what it is.

Tragically, it doesn’t stop there, some people see Jesus as good and the Church as bad. Other times, people see Jesus as irrelevant and the Church as corrupt. When I go and talk to people about Jesus, many times they have a warped understanding of who he is and what he’s about, and because of that misunderstanding, they reject my words almost reflexively. They think I came to impose a rigid way of life on them, to con them into giving me their money, and/or to force them to conform to outdated, unproven beliefs.

These are my obstacles as an evangelist from the city of Chicago. This is why even churches that teach profound, healing truths about God, have trouble growing their churches. This is why when I go out, I have to sometimes give people something for free so that they can see that I’m not trying to take from them and use them. This is why when I develop a friendship with someone, I may deliberately hold back talking about Christ so that they know I am a friend first.

When I work with churches and Christians from all walks of like, I find very diverse ways of thinking. There are thoughtful, open, and loving people who are all too quiet and stand in the background when they are needed to show the world who God wants us to be. There are also those who are boastful and set in their ways who would benefit from self-reflection, empathy, and an open mind. These people often boast of their relationship with God, but do not truly understand what that relationship means or should be.

I come to you as a man who is determined to change the way you think about God. I want to show you how to have a conversation about Jesus that is open, honest, and deep. I want to teach you how to emulate Him in a way that shows the world what he’s really like. I want to help you see the difference between fact and myth so that we can restore the image of God and build a thriving society through our knowledge of Him. I came to destroy Biblical Illiteracy. My name is Jamaal Fridge. I’m a 28-year-old African-American man from the Southside of Chicago. I received my Business degree at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI, and currently teach English in China. My mission with this book is to reintroduce you to Jesus. It doesn’t matter what your background is; you will learn at least 5 new things about God and life through this book. Those five things could change your life. Whether you are a new believer who doesn’t know much about the Bible, or a seasoned veteran in the faith, who has probably read the Bible backwards and forwards, or a skeptic, who knows some things about the Bible, but doesn’t quite buy it, I’ve got things for you to chew on.

I wrote this book a different way than most books you see about Jesus. First, I organized the story of Jesus’ life into one chronological story. There are four Gospel accounts. (Gospels are the books of the Bible that talk about the life of Jesus.) Each Gospel has different points of emphasis, which change how the author positioned the stories. So the events of Christ’s life are not exactly chronological. I arranged it into a reasonable order so that you can follow along easier. Why did I do it this way? Because we are westerners, and our culture is more centered on chronology. We want the first things to be first and the last things to be last.

But there’s a second reason: I want you to begin to see Jesus as he reveals himself to his disciples and to the world. I want you to reflect on these events as if you lived in that time and were seeing this firsthand, and I want you to honestly ask if you would have believed in him then.

Third, I don’t just give you the story of Jesus, I give you the commentary. Some things he says and does are difficult to explain. I studied about these things, and I will clarify what he was doing or saying, and why.

Lastly, I want you to see how my experience has been shaped by applying and misapplying his words. It’s one thing to explain a verse, but it’s another to put it into practice, and it’s another thing entirely to go back and review the tape and see what went wrong. What happens when you take a doctrine and apply it the wrong way? How many people have made that same mistake? How many denominations have sprang up as a result? How deep can the rot go?

I bring this book to you from the perspective of a Black man. I don’t ignore race, I don’t ignore class, I don’t ignore sex. There are no sacred cows here, no third rails. Everything is up for discussion. Why? Because God has something to say about everything. We will open up the entire situation to Him and let Him speak. Whoever has ears to hear will listen to what the Holy Spirit has to say.

When I started writing this book, it was geared towards the Chinese audience first. It was a daunting task trying to figure out how to approach my Chinese friends with the Gospel. Instinctively, I knew that God, being the creator of all men and subsequently all cultures, would have an entry point into any society. Why? Because God is already there, upholding all societies and working in their society even before they realize who He is. Because He is already here in China, there is an aspect of His character that is attractive to people from Chinese culture, but my challenge was to find out what those entry points were. I have heard stories of missionaries who went to countries and regions where they could not minister effectively until they first got a feel for that given culture. In fact, no missionary is successful without first knowing where he or she is and what makes that culture tick. As I started writing this book for my Chinese audience, I also had to do some self-evaluation. I had to learn what made me tick as an American, and even more as an African-American. I had to account for my dual mindsets.

I approach my theology from a Calvinist perspective. Also called Reformed Theology, Calvinism is the school of thought within Christianity that emphasizes God’s control over the world and over everything in it. God even has so much control that He chooses who will open their hearts to Him and be saved. Calvinists do not believe that people are able to willingly choose God, but rather that God has to reveal Himself to them in order for them to open up to Him. Calvinists also believe that once a person has been transformed by God, that they will never leave Him.

Those doctrines are important, and I do believe them, but what drew me to Calvinism was the thought that God is active in this world, and that He has something to say about everything. He has something to say about our careers, our house, our life choices, our marriage, our education, our recreation, and so on. For me, that was important because my dream of making video games about God is something that God both embraces and encourages, whereas church members can’t fathom it, and often see it as part of a corrupt world system.

My Calvinist leaning, however, is not the result of my Reformed college, which was mostly white. No, my Calvinism came from my black Reformed church on the Southside of Chicago. And the differences between the two are visible, though subtle. For instance, if you are sick, you could go to a white Calvinist church, and they will pray for you communally. They may lay hands on you, but the experience will be quiet. In my black Calvinist church, for sure they will lay hands on you, and maybe put oil on your head as they do it. The prayer will not be quiet, nor will it be short. This small example is just one of the ways I see the difference between my white-influenced American identity and my Black identity.

As I thought about how I could reach out to my friends in China, I needed to ask these kinds of questions:

Where do I fall on the spectrum between Individualism and Collectivism?

How would that affect my witness and my interpretation of Scripture?

What is the importance of face in America versus in China?

What is their understanding of sin?

On top of these, what if my friends shared my book with others? Then I would have to contend with the prospect of racial prejudice.

Would I be looked down on for being black? (Short answer: It depends.)

How would their perception of me affect my witness?

Would it produce more genuine converts if the prejudiced tuned me out from the beginning?

Had I been an older, white missionary, I would probably be respected more, which could have affected my approach to evangelism. However, being a young black man, I have a greater burden of proof, because of race-based and age-based prejudice. For Chinese people, I have found that they equate Christianity with the West, and they equate the West with power and wealth. So some Chinese people look at Christianity as a vehicle to greater wealth. So if I were white, they would listen to me. But I’m not. When they see me, they think of turmoil in Africa, poverty, and war. They say, Africa is more backwards than China, so what can a Black man really tell me?

I say all of this to say, I had to study and become more and more aware of the situation I found myself in, and I had to adjust according to my reality. I couldn’t just study the Bible and call it a day. I had to know Chinese history and culture. I had to know international relations between China, America, and Africa, just so that I knew how I’d be perceived. I had to also look inside myself to remove the cultural blinders from my eyes, all so my sharing of the Gospel would be as unobstructed as possible. I didn’t want to get in God’s way.

I feel a responsibility to the people of China and America. When you see a need, and you have what it takes to meet the need, you have the moral obligation to help. That’s how I feel. During my two years in China, I have been to the funeral of a 22-year-old boy who died from cancer. I have heard of high school students committing suicide because of bad test scores. I have heard of businessmen, who love their wives, committing adultery with young hostesses at karaoke bars just so they could get a lucrative business deal. I heard of a man who stabbed his ex-girlfriend and then killed himself not far from my apartment. I see a lot of needless suffering. I know I can’t solve every problem of suffering in China, but I do see one area I can help. Because religion is not really on people’s minds here, a lot of people have placed their hope in money or careers or relationships. The problem is that all of these things can be taken away. I see a lot of misplaced hope, so the best thing I can do for the people of China is to show them a better person to put their hope in: Jesus Christ.

However, I don’t want you to meet the Jesus in the paintings, or the Jesus on the billboards, and not the Jesus statue. I want them and you to meet, as if for the first time, the real Jesus of Nazareth. The One we must emulate. The One we must trust in. The One who is exactly like God the Father.

Let’s jump into the full story of Jesus and who he is. But before we start, I have just one request: Share this book and this website, novelgospel.net, with at least 3 friends and family members, along with others you care about. I am certain you will find valuable things in this, and your loved ones will, too. So send them to novelgospel.net. Though this ebook is hosted for free on Amazon and other ebook sites, I do not host the audio book on Amazon. The audio book can only be found on novelgospel.net. Let it bless you. Thanks for your cooperation. Let’s get to it.

Chapter 1

Creation

To understand who Jesus is, I need to take you all the way back to the beginning of time…

Before creation ever was, there existed only God. But He wasn’t just a single person sitting in a room alone, shouting Hello as His voice echoed. Quite the contrary, this God was a union of three persons. Each person was equally powerful, but there was a hierarchy among them. The Father was the chief. The Son submitted to the Father, while the Holy Spirit submitted to both the Father and the Son. The love and community between them was perfect, even though it could be speculated that they have their differences. (Imagine that, that three all-knowing beings could have differing thoughts and wills, yet could still live together in perfect harmony.) Nevertheless, each person made room for each other. They gave of themselves to facilitate the others. Such was the tightness of their bond.

Each person was all-knowing, all-powerful, and each person was everywhere. Each was eternal, having no beginning or end. Time itself was their creation. They were not three gods but one. The Son even described Himself as being born from the Father, His One and Only. And the Spirit is described as coming from the Father and even the Son. Yet each existed eternally. Even today, the mystery of the Tri-unity or Trinity is still difficult to entirely grasp. And even the things we do know about God are only because God reveals Himself to us.

It came to pass during eternity that God created angels as ministers, as well as the universe, and the earth within it. (We don’t know when He made the angels, but we know it was before the creation of the universe.) His approach to making everything was along a permissive basis. Let there be was a phrase He often used as He created, as opposed to trying to force creation to happen by extraordinary force. Such was His power. Everything that He ever made He looked at once He was finished and said, This is good.

The highlight of His creation was humanity.

In the council of the Trinity, they said, Let’s make man in Our image, after Our likeness. And let them have dominion over everything.

So God made man and woman in His image. This meant that not only would humanity look like God, but they would also have many of the same attributes of God, like creativity, reasoning ability, and other traits. One big trait they had was they would have an active relationship with God. They—we—were designed to respond consciously to Him.

After blessing them and commanding them to multiply and fill the earth, God rested from all His work and marveled at His creation. When He looked at the people He made, it was His goal for humanity to live with Him and enjoy Him and all He created forever. It was His goal for us to discover all He made and see the many uses of the things He made. For though the creation He made was perfect, it wasn’t mature. It was perfect like a baby is perfect, but the maturity of His creation was to be like a full-grown man. So it would not be fitting for a civilization of millions to still be living in a garden centuries later. Cities would be expected. Progress was expected.

However, conflict emerged, perhaps long before the creation of earth and man. One of the angels God created became very arrogant and thought that because of his high position among the angels and his splendid beauty and special talents, that he deserved to be worshipped and honored just like God! He amassed about a third of God’s angels in his rebellion, and war broke out in Heaven. This angel was defeated and expelled, along with his army of angels. They could no longer dwell in the presence of the holy God. These angels became demons, and the lead rebel, Lucifer became known as Satan because he was God’s enemy.

Satan came down to earth, and upon taking the form of a cunning snake, deceived the man and woman into disobeying God. Accusing God of withholding something good from them, he told them that a specific fruit, the only one they were commanded not to eat, was going to make them wise like God. Once they ate, though, they found that they had made a terrible mistake, and only saw that they were naked. At the customary time of day when God came calling for them, they hid because of their nakedness. When God saw that they disobeyed His order not to eat the fruit, He punished the man, the woman, and the snake who deceived them, and banished them from the paradise He created for them. As punishment, their food would be hard-earned, childbirth for the woman would be excruciating, and though originally meant to live forever, they would die.

There are many who read this introduction and think that I am pushing this story as scientific. I am not. There are many Christians who don’t take the creation story as literal, but think of it like an allegory, while others trust the story just as it’s written on the paper, even if they have questions about it. In my school, a Christian college, we were challenged to think about more than just the words on the page, but also about the culture and even linguistics of the text. I remember my professor describing the creation story as a poem to shape the identity of the people. He also compared the creation story of the Bible to other creation stories from Mesopotamia, and when we read them, we thought they were ridiculous, but these same people were masters of math. They knew things about how the world worked, and likely didn’t believe their own creation stories as literal, but still shaped their lives around it.

But he didn’t stop there. One thing my professor mentioned about the story as it was recorded in the Bible is that there are actually two creation stories side by side. As a literary device, when there are two stories side by side, it means that the authors don’t really know what happened. Yet Scripture is still given by inspiration of God. There are Christians who believe that the people in those days were primitive and did not need to be given a scientific lesson about the creation of the earth or the origin of man. They were farmers, shepherds, peasants, etc. So why give them the details? I understand this view, but I think it underestimates the intelligence of the people back then. They may not have had our technology, but their brains were just as good as ours.

What can I say about the creation of the earth and the origin of man? Simple: The secret things belong to God. What He has revealed to us belongs to us and our children forever (Deuteronomy 29:29). I may not know the details of the earth’s creation, and even astronomers still have many questions. But I have peace about the creation story in the Bible, and operate according to it. We are still sinners. The earth is not what it should be, and life is far short of what God intended it to be.

I’m telling you this because the creation story in the Bible is a controversial topic for many, and I would not be serving you properly if I didn’t give you a fuller picture of the debate. I don’t have all the answers, but if I am going to do a good job of introducing Jesus to you, I must disclose everything. I believe this saying from my chaplain, Pastor Mary Hulst: Everything that is true is from God. This may cause some people to immediately put down the book and never return. It may cause others to dig deeper on their own. But my hope is that by disclosing these things, I can earn your trust as you continue to read, because you can now be certain that I won’t hide inconvenient details.

There are many Christians who are easily shaken when their beliefs about the Bible are questioned. The creation story is the first one that many critics turn to. However, I believe the real problem is a lack of disclosure and debate in the Church. If I was a pastor, and I went over a confusing text, would it really be okay for me to say I don’t know what all this means, but yada yada yada? In the moment, yes, but not in the long run. People want answers. Good answers. They want to be able to discuss their questions without being accused to turning from their faith. Leaders in churches frequently fortify their own beliefs instead of exploring the rationale of the other beliefs rather than tackling the tough questions. That may work for a while, but the moment their members step outside and someone gives them the other side of the story, that member will feel conflicted, and even worse, betrayed, because they were left out of an important discussion. This is why so many college students have a crisis of faith when they go away to school because they get exposed to something they should’ve learned in church. It helped me a great deal to learn what I learned in a Christian college from a professor who is a church elder. I shudder to think what would’ve happened if I learned this from an Anti-theist professor at a secular university.

There is yet another problem with the creation story debate: The creation story itself is not the basis of faith in the existence of God. Rather, the Resurrection of Jesus is the proof that God is real, and that He loves mankind. For those who read my views about the creation story and think that Christianity is baseless, I will point you to the evidence of the Resurrection of Jesus in Chapter 39. It was actually my study of the Resurrection that reassured me of God’s existence during the times when I questioned the Bible. So don’t scoff; the evidence is real.

But for Christians reading this book, consider the possibility that we don’t understand the Bible as well as we like to think. We are separated by language, geography, culture, and time. Learning the Bible’s text is only one part of understanding it completely. But if you put your faith in the Resurrection of Jesus, you will be on solid ground, because the Bible hinges itself on that. If Christ has not been raised from the dead, your faith is in vain (1 Corinthians 15:17).

Chapter 2

Origins

God, who made man to rule over the earth with Him, was not happy to have people, left out in the cold. He knew before he created the world and man, that we would disobey Him and had already planned a way to rescue us from our own sin because by nature He demanded purity and righteousness. No moral imperfection could stand in His presence. He is like a blazing fire, while we are like dry leaves. While His justice called for the death of humanity, His mercy and love prompted Him to make a way to restore humanity back to good standing with Him.

As humans began to multiply, God was working out a process to create a group of His own people who would follow Him instead of constantly disobeying Him. Such people were few and far in between. In fact, it got so bad that at one point, God wiped out all of humanity except for 8 people by a global flood. He had lamented that the thoughts and doings of man were continuously evil.

After some time, God called a man named Abraham (Genesis 12) from present-day Kuwait, and told him to leave his household and family, and go to a land God would show him (present-day Israel). God would give this man—an old man with no children—descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky. Abraham believed God was able to do this, and so God credited him as righteous, creating a model of faith for all his future descendants to follow. Abraham was by no means a perfect man, and sometimes created problems that carried on long afterward, but he relied on God, and God called Abraham His friend. God blessed him with the promised son Isaac, but then later tested Abraham by telling him to sacrifice Isaac.

As harsh as it might sound, it would not have been the first time Abraham sacrificed a son, because he did it before when he expelled his wife’s servant Hagar and her son Ishmael at the request of his wife. They were given a meager canteen and sent out into the desert. If not for God’s rescue, the two would have died. It could be speculated that God was testing if Abraham was still that kind of person to kill in order to get what he wanted. It was easy for him to drive out his illegitimate son, but what about his cherished son, the son of the promise? How much does he value life now? There may be more to this story…

A few generations later, God’s people, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, were forced to take shelter in Egypt during a severe famine. Jacob’s son Joseph had been treacherously sold by his own brothers into slavery in Egypt, and then he was imprisoned on a false rape charge. God gave Joseph the ability to interpret dreams, and the Pharaoh had nightmares that no one but Joseph could interpret. This created an opportunity that led to Joseph being freed from prison and installed into a high position in the Egyptian government. Joseph was the one who predicted the famine was coming, and this enabled Egypt to prepare for it, saving many lives, including Joseph’s treacherous brothers.

Hundreds of years after the Pharaoh and Joseph died, the descendants of Abraham, now known as the Hebrews or Israelites, were now several million people. This was a sizeable minority within Egypt, which caused the new Pharaoh to seek to weaken them before they overtook the native Egyptians. So he enslaved them and brutally oppressed them. He went as far as to demand newborn males to be thrown into the river, but there was one boy that survived. Instead, he was placed into a floating basket and left to float among the reeds, under the watchful eye of his sister. The daughter of the Pharaoh found the boy and adopted him as her own, naming him Moses. It was funny the way God worked in Moses’ life, because the Pharaoh’s daughter had the boy raised for her by a Hebrew woman—the boy’s mom—and she was paid to do it! The mom got paid to raise the baby that she was supposed to have killed!

Moses grew up knowing he was Hebrew, though that fact may have escaped the Pharaoh. Moses was inclined to his people, not letting the royal lifestyle separate him from their suffering. It came to pass that when he went to look at his people’s suffering, he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, and when he saw that no one was around, Moses killed that Egyptian and buried him. Problem solved, right? Wrong. Another time he came out and saw two Hebrews fighting each other, and once he tried to stop them, one said that Moses was not their ruler, and thought he would kill them just like he did the Egyptian. Word of Moses killing the Egyptian got back to the Pharaoh, who immediately sought to kill Moses. This caused Moses to flee the country into what is now northwest Saudi-Arabia. There he lived for 40 years, married, had children, and lived as a shepherd. In that time, God was hearing the cries of His people, and so He appeared to Moses and told him to go back to Egypt to liberate his people.

Moses had a lot of trepidation about going back, so God showed him His power by giving Moses leprosy (a horrifying, debilitating, contagious disease) and immediately healing it, as well as turning Moses’ staff into a snake and back again. Still Moses asked God what name he should tell the people when they ask who sent him. God’s answer was a bit strange: I am who I am. Tell them ‘I Am’ sent you. It was kind of an answer/non-answer. I just am. It was fitting for such a mysterious God. In a way, the name ‘I Am’ points to His self-existence, His eternal nature. He indeed was the Living God, who kept His promise to give His friend Abraham descendants as numerous as the stars of the sky.

Armed now with the makeshift name for the true God, Moses set off to Egypt, where he met his brother Aaron. Because Moses had a stuttering problem, Aaron would speak for him. Together, they went to the new Pharaoh and demanded the release of the Hebrews so they could go out into the desert to worship. The Pharaoh was unwilling, just as God told Moses he would be. God wanted the Pharaoh to harden his heart, to think himself a god, so that God could make an example of him. Over the course of repeated demands, the Pharaoh was unrelenting. Moses displayed God’s power with 10 consecutive plagues, like lice in people’s hair, locusts devouring crops, rivers turning into blood, and many others. However, the Pharaoh himself had sorcerers who could pull off miraculous signs too, so he remained unconvinced, even though at some point even the sorcerers were persuaded.

The final straw came when Moses predicted the death of every firstborn boy in Egypt. In preparation for this, the Hebrews were told to put the blood of a lamb over their doorposts as a sign for the death angel to pass over their house. This final plague took the life of Pharaoh’s son, breaking him at last. He told the Hebrews to leave immediately, and the Egyptian people, who had compassion on the Hebrews, gave them gifts on their way out.

However, upon realizing that he just lost his labor force, Pharaoh began a fierce pursuit to reclaim the Hebrews. He chased them to the Red Sea, thinking he had them cornered, but God sent a strong wind that created a path of dry ground in the sea for the people to cross. Once they got across, as Pharaoh and his army pursued them, the strong wind ceased, and the waves crashed back down on Pharaoh and his army, killing them. This created great fame for God among the surrounding countries. There was a new king that was even greater than the king of Egypt.

Earlier I talked about Yahweh or Jehovah as the Living God. He’s not some isolated Being from some ancient book. I see His hand daily in my life. He is the same Living God that me and my wife prayed to last week. We said to Him, Lord, if you want my wife to quit her job and work from home, please send her more clients. Quickly. Sure enough, three more clients came to her within a week asking for her service. We saw God’s answer to our prayer. For those who don’t believe God is real, these circumstances are among many reasons people believe in God. We don’t see Him physically, but we can