No one and nothing compares to JESUS.

It is a joy to be home after travel. In God's goodness He gives time to reflect. My enduring reflection from the last few weeks is that nothing compares to the glory of our Saviour, His incarnation and love for us. Meeting friends from different religions on the journey I was struck by three distinctives, the incomrable uniqueness of Jesus. 

1. Our God is relational and has not only an extraordinary eternal plan to enable us to reconnect with Him, but goes to unfathomable lengths to execute that plan in love to secure for us an eternal security and reality in that relationship which can never be broken.

For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 8:38-39

2. Our living, loving God is himself our hope, the only one who makes sense of our lives and world, the only one who provides and is the lasting solution. The Christian truth of who Jesus is and has accomplished, provides not only radical and revolutionary answer to our identity and life search today but is an ongoing, never ending reality that cannot be changed. Whilst other religions conceive of an eternity which perpetuates a world which apes everything known in this fallen life, for the Christian the hope is being with God himself in relational intimacy, full of his perfection, in his protection in an environment free from rebellion, lies, tears, death, mourning, selfishness, fallenness, deterioration, human pride, sadness. Heaven is heaven because of who God is. Other world religions do not have a concept of heaven which is anything other than an improved world with human brokenness, because they do not know the living God, who came himself, died for us in love, and prepares a place for us to enjoy what we are made to enjoy most... HIM. The Muslim concept of paradise is not about relationship with the presence of God. Buddhist, Hindu, and Eastern philosophical concepts of paradise are about cyclical perpetual and hyperthical imaginations of what an afterlife could look like if we imagined it. Human made idols of stone, metal and wood do not feel or offer a slution to my pain and trauma. The firm Christian reality is based on the historical Jesus, his physical death and the reality of His resurrection, the implications this has for  the reality of our existence and identity. The trauma of the cross is not only central to the bible but all human and eteranl history. Here in the cross of Jesus I find the only hope for our world and each of us.

3. Only the living God has a solution to trauma and sufferring. Whilst other world religions have a wishful desire to deal with the psychology of sufferring, only Jesus Christ enters into our world of sufferring and takes on the trauma himself. He choses the powerlessness of humanity, in a world of overwhelming brokenness. He, the LORD bigger than creation, all cosmological power and might, becomes the vulnerability of a single human cell, choosing in humility the size smaller than a full stop. He does it out of choice, choosing submission to pain, and choosing rejection, indignity, identity abuse, humiliation, public disgrace, injustice, death,  undeserved and without fault. He does it to taken on our pain and deliver a solution for it, to take on the consequences of our rejection of God's way and all the ramifications of it, to provide an unimpaired and unspoilable solution for all who trust in Him as Saviour and Lord. He will make all things new. He does prepare a way and a place with him for all who trust in the one who beats death, God's enemies and brokenness. We have only seen our environment through eyes which know a suffering world,  hearts which are broken by a fallen cosmos. The one who says "I am making all things new" knows the reality of perfection unspoiled and has that as our solution as we walk his way. In Christ we are delivered from the power of brokenness, and one day we will be free from the consequences of brokenness.

Surely he has borne our griefs

and carried our sorrows;

yet we esteemed him stricken,

    smitten by God, and afflicted.

5 

But he was pierced for our transgressions;

    he was crushed for our iniquities;

upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,

    and with his wounds we are healed.

6 

All we like sheep have gone astray;

    we have turned—every one—to his own way;

and the Lord has laid on him

    the iniquity of us all.

(ISAIAH 53) 

And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.” 

(REV 21:5)

No one compares to my Saviour Jesus, the historical Christ, the baby of Bethlehem, the God-man crucified and ascended Lord, my rescuer, redeemer and certain hope.