Nearly 2000 years ago, the New Testament, or New Covenant, came into being. Its principle language is Greek, the most common tongue of the first few centuries after Christ. The New Testament begins with the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The first three very similar, yet each has a different emphasis concerning the person and work of Jesus Christ, the obvious and principle character of all four of the gospels. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are sometimes called the “synoptic gospels”, because all three see many of the same things in the life of Christ, even though each is still different. John, the fourth gospel, is dramatically different though it, too, focuses on the person and work of Christ.
While Matthew dwells on the royalty and kingship of Christ, complete with His genealogical bloodline, Luke concentrates on the humanity of Jesus, appropriate to the pen of a doctor, the occupation of Luke, who penned it. Mark emphasizes the servanthood aspect of Christ who came, said Mark, “Not to be ministered unto, but to minister.” Arriving, then, at John’s gospel, everything changes. It is not the kingship of Christ, nor the humanity of Christ, nor the servanthood of Christ that is set forth. It is His deity, His being very God a very God, the divine Logos “who was in the beginning with God and without whom nothing was made that was made.“
So emphatically does Christ claim His oneness with the Father that the Jews actually took up stones to stone Him, believing He had made Himself to be equal with God. In point of fact, He did precisely that, and did not attempt to deny the charge before His accusers.
These four dramatic gospels, biographies of Christ, are followed with the Acts of the Apostles, a very critical and principle history book of the New Testament. The book of Acts is the vital bridge between the gospels and the epistles. It recounts the strategic morphing of Jew and Gentile into one new body of Christ, a spiritual organism comprised of all believers in Christ, with this risen Christ as the ascended and glorified Head.
The Church epistles follow as Paul wrote to seven churches, plus personal letters to Timothy, Titus, and Philemon. Completing the New Testament are the general epistles of Hebrews, James, Peter and John and Jude, with the capstone depicting the risen, glorified Christ returning to earth to finish unsettled business in the Second Coming. Thus, the eternal state becomes the capstone of all God’s dealings with man, commencing in the Old Testament and concluding in the New.
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