How great is God,
exalted in power, majestic above all.
The heavens tell of His greatness.
The skies display His awesome craftsmanship.
Day after day they continue to speak.
Night after night they make Him known.
In creating the heavens, God also created the earth
and formed man from the dust of the ground,
and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.
The God of love created man and woman in His own image
to have a relationship with Him.
And so in the beginning, they revered and honored God
and lived in harmony with Him.
This continued until one day Satan tempted the woman
to eat the forbidden fruit
and she gave it to the man who also ate.
In so doing, mankind rebelled against God
and went his own way.
As a result of this sin, mankind was separated from God
and was thrown out of the Garden of Eden.
But God still loved mankind.
It was never His desire to be separate from those He created,
yet how could God be holy and the source of perfect justice
if He did not judge mankind for their sin?
In His Holy Book, God reveals His plan
to save the world from His judgment.
One of the first to see this plan unfold was Abraham.
Abraham was a righteous man whom God promised to bless
and make his descendants as numerous
as the sand of the sea and the stars of the sky.
To test his obedience, God told Abraham
to sacrifice his son as an offering to Him.
Abraham trusted God and sought to obey Him.
But as he raised his knife to kill his son,
the angel of the Lord stopped Him.
He saw that Abraham feared God and was willing to obey Him.
Then Abraham saw a ram caught by its horns in a thicket,
and he sacrificed the ram instead of his son
as an offering to God.
And so God showed Abraham that a lamb or a similar animal
was to be slain as a temporary covering for sin
until God would provide His ultimate sacrifice
to pay for the sins of mankind.
Instead of sin separating man from God,
the sacrifice would restore their relationship.
The Holy Scriptures speak of One who was to come
and be the ultimate sacrifice for the sins of the world.
As the ram took the place of Abraham's son,
so this One who would come would take man's place
so he could be forgiven.
Some refer to this person as the Messiah,
the One who would come and reconcile the world
back to God once and for all.
The prophets predicted many things in detail about
the Messiah hundreds of years before He appeared.
The prophet Isaiah foretold that His birth
was to be a miraculous one.
A virgin would conceive a child who was to be called,
in a spiritual sense, the Son of God.
The prophet Micah predicted that the Messiah
would be born in Bethlehem,
while the prophet Zechariah foretold
His entry into Jerusalem on a donkey
and His betrayal by Judas, one of His followers.
Isaiah prophesied what the Messiah would do when He came.
The Lord's anointed will preach the Good News to the poor,
bind up the brokenhearted, proclaim freedom
for the captives and proclaim that the time
has come when the Lord will save His people.
So, who was the Messiah?
In the first century, a prophet came called Jesus.
Some thought He was the one the prophet spoke about.
Could this be?
Did His life fulfill what was predicted of Him?
Was Jesus more than a prophet?
What follows is His story, based on eyewitness accounts
as recorded in The Holy Scriptures.
An actor plays the part of Jesus,
and though no actor is worthy of such a role,
it has been done so that we may understand
and benefit from the life of Jesus.