February 4 2024: Bible Verse of the Day – Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B, Wednesday of the First Week in Ordinary Time – Why Did Jesus Come to Earth?
Catholic Readings For Today
Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
Wednesday of the First Week in Ordinary Time
Why Did Jesus Come to Earth?
Many people ask why Jesus Christ came to earth. They get different explanations from different people, but mostly they do not get the real reason that made God to send His only begotten Son to the world as the last resort.
There is an African proverb that says, “a man who does not know where the rain began to beat him cannot say where he dried his body!”
Therefore, to better understand how we got ourselves to this deep state of sin, let us retrace back our steps to where this rain of sin started beating us.
Fall of man in Adam and Eve
From the Bible Verse below we see how man was banished from the unconditional God’s Grace and Providence to conditional providence.
“Then the Lord God said: See! The man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil! Now, what if he also reaches out his hand to take fruit from the tree of life, and eats of it and lives forever?
The Lord God, therefore, banished him from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he had been taken.
He expelled the man, stationing the cherubim and the fiery revolving sword east of the garden of Eden, to guard the way to the tree of life. – Genesis 3:22-23
Satan was the genesis of man’s misery. After being banished by God from the Heavenly Kingdom, he set forth in quest to build his earthly kingdom whose characteristics are the exact opposite of what is practised in God’s Kingdom.
The bone of contention now between God and Satan is who will praised and glorified more than the other.
But don’t forget that the whole world is a creation of God, but satan, still a creation of God, works entirely on earth and its contents.
So, after God created Adam and Eve, Satan had his chance to divert man’s attention, faithfulness and obedience from God to himself.
So using the serpent, he managed to remove man from the Grace of God and man was banished from the Garden of Eden, which we can equate to the Kingdom of Heaven, where the Tree of Life is found.
After eating the forbidden fruit, man was able to distinguish between good and evil and therefore he could tell that what God advocates for is good, everlasting and righteous and what Satan advocates for is bad, shortlived and earthly. God gave man the free will and choice to choose between good and evil.
God expected man to choose Him and remain faithful and obedient to Him but man disobeyed God and followed the lies of the devil.
This is when God’s anger began. We say that our God is a jealous God, He expects us to accord Him our undivided attention, love, service, praise and glory.
Man Sunk Deeper into Sin
After man was banished from the Garden of Eden, he was left with the choice of doing good according to God’s desire or doing evil and therefore disobeying God.
Since man had been told to multiply and fill the earth, Adam and Eve had been blessed with children. Many years later, Adam’s generation had grown big.
There was a part of this generation that was faithful and obedient to God, the likes of Noah and another part of this generation that was intrinsically evil.
God’s Attempt To Punish Man’s Sins Through Floods
Man had become so defiant to God that he even started worshipping idols. Man sunk into earthly pleasures, which is part of the earthly kingdom, and God was not happy. God decided to completely annihilate the evildoers and be left with the obedient ones.
This is well articulated in the Story of Noah and the Ark. God sent a very heavy rain on the earth and all evil evildoers were wiped out of the face of the earth except Noah and his family.
This was the first attempt by God to save the earth of all evildoers. But God said never again will He destroy the world through floodwaters again.
Sending of the Prophets
Noah and his family were safely on dry land and his family multiplied again and again up to the time of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob from whom we get the twelve tribes of Israel.
The Israelites were the chosen tribe of God. They got so many favours and privileges from God because God loved them unconditionally.
God wanted the Israelites to Know Him, Love Him, Serve Him, Praise and Glorify Him all the days of their lives. But they, most of the time if not all the times, rebelled and disobeyed God. They carved idols and worshipped them and forsake God who removed them from slavery in Egypt.
God began sending prophets to the Israelites so that they could reveal how the Kingdom of God is and therefore mend their ways, repent their sins and return to God to Know Him, Love Him, Serve Him, Praise and Glorify Him all the days of their lives.
My friends, after listening to the Good News from the prophets, instead of repenting and returning to God, the Israelites rejected the messages with contempt. They even killed the prophets and others sent to exile.
This is how the fate of the prophets was being sealed.
So, now that we have retraced back our steps and seen where the rain started beating us, let’s now interrogate why then Jesus came to earth and how to live within the Gospel of Christ.
So, Why Did Jesus Come to Earth?
After the Israelites mistreated and killed the prophets, God then said to Himself, “what if I send My own Son so that He can tell My people about the Good News of the Kingdom of God? I Am sure they will listen to Him because He knows exactly how the Heavenly Kingdom is and they will believe Him.”
In Matthew 21:33-45, the Parable of the Tenants, Jesus sums up this whole story above of how the Israelites mistreated the prophets and the messengers.
He then explains how God now sent Him as His only begotten Son thinking they will respect Him, but alas! that was not the case. They killed Him too.
Brothers and sisters, God sent Jesus Christ to earth. As the Bible Verse says in Matthew 1:21, “Jesus Christ came to earth to save us from our sins.”
This is for the reason that after repenting to Jesus, we will be saved from our sins and therefore be clean and pristine before we go before God on our last day.
The Bible Verses below explains that Jesus came to this earth to do the will of His Father.
Jesus said, “For I have come down from heaven, not to do My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me” – John 6:38
Jesus cried out and said, “Whoever believes in me believes not only in me but also in the one who sent me, and whoever sees me sees the one who sent me. – John 12:44-45
When God sent His Son Jesus Christ to earth, He sent Him as the Way, the truth and the Life. In John 14:6 Jesus said to Thomas, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Unlike the prophets who were just messengers, Jesus sums up everything you need to enter the Heavenly Kingdom.
But why did Jesus leave the wonderful, glorious and most Holy Heaven to this troublesome, sinful and chaotic earth?
It is because the love that God has for us is unconditional. He would never want anybody to perish in sin. This Bible Verse below sums it up
And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.
For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him will not be condemned, but whoever does not believe has already been condemned, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. – John 3:14-18
Conclusion: The Cycle of Our Human Life and Destiny
You know, God created us in His own image. Before He creates us He already knows for what reason He is creating us.
He knows the exact tasks we will perform right from when we are born until death. No one is created by God without a purpose.
When God creates us and places us on earth, He expects us to work as per our talents. We are then required to exploit and utilize our talents and on the process serve, praise and glorify God.
So it means we initially come from God, then He places us on earth to accomplish a particular task. Then once we accomplish that, He wishes that we go back to Him on the last day in glory.
Therefore Jesus, from His many teachings, was sent to make sure that while we are here on earth we don’t get trapped by satan and end up in the fiery Gehennah. Jesus wants us to return to Heaven our original home.
Jesus tells us that we fall into sin when we exploit our talents and fail to attribute our success to God.
When we become successful, we start worshipping money, social status and earthly power. We forget that all that is in this earth belong to God and only Him we should give glory to.
What does Jesus Mean? He means that when you get money, praise and glorify God. Don’t praise money and an earthly king and forget God because that is sin.
Jesus also says that God gives you money to enable you to serve Him better. But we human beings pray to God to give us money but after we get it we forget God and start worshipping money.
That is the one reason Jesus told the young rich man that it is easier for a camel to enter through the eye of the needle than for a rich man to enter into Heaven.
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