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Face to Face With Jesus
Face to Face With Jesus
Face to Face With Jesus
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Face to Face With Jesus

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How would you respond to an encounter with the Master? Face to Face with Jesus explores various persons in the Gospels as they met Jesus. While their response to him proved their eagerness to follow him, or their refusal for whatever reason, they proved their real nature when confronting him; as we prove ours. We come to him with our questions, doubts, successes and failures, but in face-to-face with Jesus we disclose our real self. We always see our shortcomings or potentials, our obedience or rebellion in the encounter.

Face to Face with Jesus gives careful attention to spiritual and Biblical integrity as it re-creates interviews Jesus had with real Bible people. Only possible details are created by the writer. Each chapter ends with questions or declarations for our consideration in determining our personal response to Jesus. Our evaluations may prove comforting, or troubling.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherVirg Hurley
Release dateMay 18, 2015
ISBN9781311700766
Face to Face With Jesus
Author

Virg Hurley

Born in Lincoln, Illinois, Virg accepted Jesus as Savior and Lord at age 18, and dedicated his life to proclaiming Jesus Christ as Lord. He attended Lincoln Christian College and Seminary, earning a B.A. in Ministry, an M.A. in Church History and a B.D. in New Testament, writing two theses in one year. He has preached in Illinois, Nevada and currently in California. He also taught Ministries at Ozark Christian College in Joplin, Missouri. Presently ministering to a seniors' church in Escondido, California.

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    Book preview

    Face to Face With Jesus - Virg Hurley

    FACE TO FACE WITH JESUS

    Copyright 2015 Virg Hurley

    Published by Virg Hurley at Smashwords

    Smashwords Edition License Notes

    This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

    Table of Contents

    Preface

    Chapter 1: Insuperable Assignment - Epiphany

    Chapter 2: Insuperable Assignment - The Search

    Chapter 3: Insuperable Assignment - Perspectives

    Chapter 4: Evil Incarnate I - Jesus, Winner And Still Champion

    Chapter 5: Evil Incarnate II- In Christ We Also Conquer

    Chapter 6: Unexpected Encounter – The Samaritan Woman

    Chapter 7: Mistaken Ideal

    Chapter 8: Unthinkable Betrayal

    Chapter 9: Disillusioned Inquisitor

    Chapter 10: Converted Businessman

    Chapter 11: Welcome King

    Chapter 12: Powerless Authority

    Chapter 13: Partners In Death

    Chapter 14: Gauntlet To Unbelievers

    Chapter 15: Ecstasy

    Chapter 16: Struggle To Believe

    Chapter 17: Crucible Of Courage

    Chapter 18: Uncensored Christ

    About the Author

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    Preface

    Bible biographies continue to attract and fascinate readers because they offer examples of ongoing human nature, and because they express the existing tension between an infinitely wise God and incorrigibly flawed humanity. The biographies of those vis á vis Jesus remain relevant, because they model the reactions still given him today by those in identical situations. Particularly, as they proved their real nature when confronting him, we prove ours. The real self, now...not the self we’d like to project; we’d like to possess; we want everyone to think we express; the idealized self that gets lost in the reality of daily life. Like them, we bring predilections to our interview with Christ. Like them, we either adjust our predilections or his teachings. Like them, the difference between success and failure in discipleship is the extent of our adjustment between our expectations and Christ’s demands. The challenge to faith comes at the point of difference between our perceptions of God and his revealed Self. For it’s always disturbing when sinful mortals stand face to face with Jesus, up close and personal, his all-seeing eyes gazing, our uncovered self seen.

    The historical setting of each interview in this book is real; only the details are created by the writer as they could have occurred; and always with careful attention to spiritual and Biblical integrity. While it’s naturally easier to critique them than ourselves, after each chapter, or subject, I offer a list of questions or declarations to help us determine our personal response to Jesus when similarly challenged. We may find the evaluations more troubling than comforting.

    Chapter 1

    Insuperable Assignment

    -Epiphany-

    At midmorning the sixth day from home, Jesus hurried forward when Joseph called him to the summit from a pack of boys trudging beside the burros. Joseph put an arm across his shoulder and swept the other towards the lofty plateau above ancient valleys: Jerusalem!

    From his first words Jesus had forecast the kind of genius villagers heard only prodigies possessed. As he matured, an unbroken spiritual intuition and discernment distinguished him, astonishing and irritating his contemporaries. Each year he watched other boys leave for the Passover and return seasoned by the experience. Since his twelfth birthday the youth thought of little else, for he instinctively understood that what had happened there, to others, would offer him defining instruction, exposing for him spiritual treasures presently cached in his undisclosed depths.

    Now here he stood at last, participating in, not merely a spectator of the most ancient and meaningful Jewish Feast. As he looked, a quivering awareness and ripening expectation surged within, a cornucopia of feelings and convictions he couldn’t immediately harvest, but which at once animated and stimulated, persuaded and bolstered him. An already-irresistible force had seized him; an awareness that frightened as it delighted both parents standing alongside. Every feature aglow, his high, thin voice shouted, Look, father, the temple; why, it’s like a mountain of snow, like Mt. Hermon in winter.

    After some time, the trio continued their journey, joining an army of worshipers in their friendly assault on this fabled city. On they came, by the multiple thousands until two to three million pilgrims arrived, religious to their core, devoted to Moses, and some of them hot-breathed, red-eyed patriots with added agendas.

    At the northeast corner of Jerusalem the Nazarenes entered the Kidron Valley, then exited at Mt. Olivet to their pre-arranged rendezvous, pitched their tents and spent the night awaiting the Passover.

    As sunrise rimmed the mountain behind them, Joseph and Jesus walked to an overview and looked across the valley. Joseph pointed out the city’s landmarks, and his son greedily absorbed each term and description: the revered three-tiered temple; its despised Tower of Antonia, a quarter its size, mocking the Glory by its pretense, Caesar infringing on God; the buildings housing the government’s bureaucracy; the houses, apartments and palaces of the famous and wealthy on the terraced western hills, open to the holy place, as if seeking a blessing; the ostentatious swagger of Herod’s Palace, flaunting its stateliness towards the Majesty opposite. And, everywhere, the monstrous limestone blocks that shored up valleys and created broad terraces for the structures built on them. A city of permanence, son, Joseph volunteered after the visual survey, hard to imagine any change in its existence.

    After breakfast Joseph and his family joined other pilgrims marching down the Kidron to its junction with the Hinnom Valley. Here the steep Tyropean Valley led northwest, intersecting the city above them. Here the pilgrims, the twelve year olds among them bursting with pride in their first national acclaim of God Almighty, ascended slowly, singing to the accompaniment of flutists, I rejoiced with those who said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord.’

    From the valley floor only massive walls could be seen, laid course on course from bedrock, enclosing the great city in their stony embrace. Up the canyon the worshipers edged, now a broad, now a narrow column, accompanists leading, everyone chanting Psalms, climbing higher from the five hundred foot depths, step by step past four foot high stones darkened by years of use, mold growing in secluded crevices. Far above and beyond the cool and refreshing canyon floor, strong with the odor of captive damp, they saw the viaduct that leaped the canyon between the temple grounds and the city’s western suburbs. And, from the start, the entire length of the journey, merchants of every possible product shamelessly hawked their wares, mindlessly unaware of the occasion’s sanctity and the worshipers’ desire to focus on God.

    At the southwest corner of the temple mount, where the grand staircase carried the Valley northwest past the Western Wall, the pilgrims turned up the broad, covered staircase leading to the Huldah Gate of the temple and to the ritual baths carved from limestone at its base. Here, segregated by sex, each bathed before ascending steps to the Court of the Gentiles. Then, in family units, up they walked, other parents and children surrounding—the parents accustomed, the boys thrilled—and Jesus feeling a thunder peal in each heart beat!

    The stairs led Joseph and Mary to worship. As he threw his mind out like a net, gathering everything within sight, they led Jesus to mystery, interrogation and discovery. Up they walked, hand in hand, the boy called spiritually-aloft in his ascent of a temple Herod had rebuilt from the foundation upward, according to Solomonic design, into a luxury that attracted visitors Empire-wide. Into the Court of the Gentiles they passed, the entire complex running hundreds of yards in every direction, cobblestoned and surrounded by massive porches.

    Jesus gasped at the Court’s size, though he had often heard Joseph speak of its colossal dimensions. Between and before the colonnades the lad saw merchants and the tables and cages, some extending awnings into the Court to enlarge their space. Scores of thousands occupied the area in a Babel of languages, clothing and colors, nearly everyone using it as a thoroughfare to the Jewish courts beyond. Here Joseph chose the lamb his family would share with another, paid the vendor and, in a single, swift motion perfected by years of practice, seized the startled animal’s four legs, squeezed each pair together and swung it over his head, the legs held securely in front by his left hand.

    As they approached the Court of the Women, Jesus saw the balustrade Joseph had prepared him to expect: and on it a warning to Gentiles not to trespass on the threat of death. Climbing the few steps into the Court of the Women and looking through it, his heart leaping, Jesus glimpsed the Magnificence beyond, its protective wall pierced by many gates. Throughout the Court prophets and teachers exhorted their audiences while rabbis taught and discussed among themselves. Soon passing the trumpet-shaped chests of the Treasury, Mary dropped coins that rattled into the receptacle below.

    The family walked together to the fifteen steps leading through the Nicanor Gate into the Court of Israel. As Mary watched delighted, Joseph asked his intensely-animated son to carry the lamb. He could hardly wait to receive it as Joseph, with strong arms, lifted the animal above his head and deposited it sideways into the boy’s extended limbs. Shuffling them, Jesus snugly cradled the lamb, its frightened black eyes and soft bleating soon quieted by his embrace.

    Mary remained behind as Joseph and Jesus walked slowly up the stairs into the vast concourse jammed with male worshipers and their sons. Funneled by ropes, strung between portable posts, into one of many long lines leading to thousands of priests on duty, the pair inched forward. As the line crawled, Jesus kept his gaze focused beyond and above. He saw the horns, then the great, high altar of sacrifice, a 75 foot square of undressed stone rising 22 feet, its ramp climbing from the south. He inhaled the odorous mixture of blood, meat and fire; above all, he listened intently as, from the Court of the Priests, and carrying throughout the Court of Israel, soaring Levitical voices and instruments praised and petitioned God Almighty.

    THEN, definitively...thirty-three feet beyond the altar, on a terrace reached by 12 steps, the SANCTUARY! Transfixed, he scrutinized its long, wide and high magnificence, its monstrous white limestone blocks, 37 feet long, 12 feet high and 20 feet wide, its eastern end a gold-plated luxuriance, its twin 40 foot temple doors, the vines and grape clusters tall as a man, opening into the Temple Porch. Inside, where he could never go, he envisaged the Holy Place, windows at the high ceilings, its table, lampstand and altar of incense; and beyond that, and the spectacular double-curtained tapestry, a cube of perfection, never lighted and always dark, never seen, and only annually entered, the Name of God residing in and filling the emptiness.

    He had heard it all many times, but now he saw it, rising level by level, flight by flight, terrace by terrace, height by height above all: God’s House. His eyes feasted on the snowy mass before him, gilded with gold panels, embellished with precious stones, tier upon snowy tier of massive stone, forty-five, sixty, ninety, a hundred-fifty feet high; a fifteen story monument to the Eternal!

    They waited long for their turn, though it seemed an instant to the lad, so intent on discovery, so enraptured by every sight, sound and smell. It all seemed so new, yet inexplicably familiar to him; so ambiguous, yet inexplicably plain; so daunting, yet inexplicably comfortable; so unlikely, yet inexplicably coherent.

    Without realizing it would happen so quickly, but having prepared himself for its inevitability, they stood at last before the priest. Joseph turned to retrieve the now-sleeping lamb from Jesus. Suddenly awakened and terrorized, the lamb bleated loudly. Joseph set it down, with a swift slash opened its jugular and, as Jesus watched intently, drained the blood into a bowl the priest held. The priest removed organs, small portions of fat and offal from the lamb, took the blood and passed it from priest to priest until it was dashed against the base of the altar. Then Joseph was free to take his son back to Mary.

    But Jesus wasn’t free to go.

    As he knew it would, though he didn’t know when or how, something explicit occurred in his spiritual experience as he watched, studied and pondered the scene. He had heard it all, from his father’s faithful teaching of the Torah, and from his own reading in the Law. Now he had seen it: the great spaces of the Courts; the magnificent gates through the walls; the semi-circular steps leading upward level by level to the altar in use; the Sanctuary beyond and, above all, the lamb slain.

    Something in that sacrifice aroused him intellectually, spiritually and emotionally. Of all the sights and sounds blitzing his mind, competing for and demanding his attention, seeing the altar, the temple and the lamb sacrificed, moved him as nothing else could. An unfathomed depth in him surged upward to meet God’s plunging interrogation, and the conjunction of structure and ceremony issued him a stunning clarity of understanding and purpose. The inextricable linking of lamb and temple especially, irresistibly, and profoundly mesmerized the lad.

    Instantaneously and intuitively, as if the hidden prompting vocalized itself, awareness flashed across his mind: he was the lamb moments before living, now dead! It was he, now alive in youth but, in a Passover to come, returning from the sacrifice a corpse. From the altar’s flame and smoke, pouring out spiraling columns of incense, to the lifeless lamb in Joseph’s arms, Jesus looked; its eyes closed, its blood gone, its bleat stopped.

    This was his future, then...death and death and death! Life to death. Hope to death. Youth to death. That was his fate. Death and Death and Death. Twelve year old emotions staggered under the colossal darkness eclipsing him. He choked at the swelling lump in his throat. Sweat beaded his brow as he shook away the burning in his suddenly-smarting eyes. Oppression began strangling his confidence, disheartening his optimism, destroying his courage. It was too much for anyone, let alone one SO YOUNG!

    Then...when it seemed his heart would burst from the trauma, Rescue. Relief. Enlightenment. Jesus suddenly cocked his head slightly...as if someone were speaking...as if someone counseled him to look beyond the end to the new beginning without end...to listen again to the swelling Levitical instruments and voices...to look again at the magnificent structure designed in Heaven and given to Moses.

    Like a scholar before his tutor, he obeyed...and maturity bloomed! In waves the new awareness came, taking shape like clay under a seal. Yes, his would be a crushing tempest of sacrifice, blood and death, but followed by reconstructed renewal. Yes, an obliterating demolition would bury him, but out of the rubble he would rise, arms, hands, legs and body, alive in resurrection power, the rubble a powdery disintegration at his feet.

    On and on that instruction flowed, his young mind a seasoned vessel preserving every word. On and on it came, assuring him a death that achieved the result God desired, followed by ineffable glories, his life swallowing the death that dared ingest him. That was the whole story, the Voice continued, endurance followed by ecstasy, death by resurrection, sorrow by joy.

    It could have been an hour, a day, a decade, a lifetime he stood there, he learned so completely and clearly in those few minutes of epiphany, unraveling mysteries hidden in him from birth, blossoming the buds forming in his mind those dozen years.

    Now all that had puzzled opened clearly; from mysteries too deep to explain came solutions; from inner dimensions beyond measure came answers lying within since birth, awaiting the call to clarification, explanation and fulfillment.

    A soft sunrise beauty now wreathed his countenance. Love poured across his face, his eyes glittering, dancing beatifically, his entire being a magnificent serenity, his lips slightly open, his eyes blinking slowly to catch every fleeting instant.

    As one glorious scene after another crossed his olive skin, peace on peace, love on love, joy on joy, he stood beside Joseph lost in reverie, listening to Another Voice calling him back to his origins, responding quietly, sweetly, reverently, maturely.

    And Joseph heard his boy say something to himself, lost in a mixture of wonder, admiration, contemplation and surrender, a whisper preserving its sanctity, Yes, Father, I understand...Your will be done in this temple through mine!

    Unthinkable; incredible. Suddenly, at the Feast of the Unleavened Bread, without having to study further, he clearly perceived. As if all dimensions had cleared within his mind and soul and spirit. As if God himself pulled all the shades and poured his own gleaming brilliance into this boy, Jesus understood.

    His life had been a savings account into which he deposited all his knowledge and experience. Now as he drew the interest from that hoard, he KNEW. All his adolescent erudition matured in one brilliant shining. From concealed chambers deep within illumination flashed.

    He had lived in a world to which he felt a stranger, among people from whom he felt different, like things created by him but different from and less than him. Now, as he stood there, something from outside of time, beyond time, and before time came to him. Something previously hidden in fragments of ideas and concepts and convictions that had fluttered in his mind, hidden in the alteration from Spirit-Deity to God-man, suddenly and tumultuously poured enlightenment into him. As he stood before God’s great temple, and saw the slain lamb, he knew, absolutely and clearly, that as surely as it opened eastward to the future...to new life...to a new day...to possibility...to hope...to rebirth...to tomorrow...it most clearly and emphatically opened TO HIM.

    In HIM the temple found its real purpose, as the person in whom God would be close to, not distant from; and seen by, not hidden from his people.

    He came to Jerusalem in the fullness of time, with all Israel focused on God’s deliverance, with his own life a quarry of building blocks supporting an armory of spiritual experiences. And, in the Passover experience, all his vast spiritual sufficiency sharpened and intensified, identifying the parts of the whole he had always been. It clarified the reason for his twelve previous years of decisions and behavior and gave clarity to his future life.

    Now he knew why, on the ridges north of the city, and on the overview east of the city, and in his fixation on the sanctuary since he first entered its precincts, he had studied, searched and pondered it. Wherever else Joseph pointed, and Jesus looked to see, he had returned to the temple mount, as if something there had meaning that nothing else he saw possessed; as if understanding that meaning would uncover his purpose in coming to the city, to the Passover, to the world. In every quizzical look and furrowing brow since first seeing the temple, he experienced a uniting of past and present, the past unlocking, the present standing open before it, as if the spiritual fire within him needed only the temple oxygen to set it ablaze.

    Standing in the Court of Israel, when his father had finished and turned, ready to go, but paralyzed by a look in his son’s face he had never before seen, Jesus had his personal epiphany.

    For an instant the incredible story of his son’s birth flashed across Joseph’s mind. He instinctively knew that Jesus was talking to God. He had often seen his child contemplative, his mind seeking keys to undeciphered, unsolved mysteries, but never with every feature so concentratedly focused. As Joseph stood awestruck, unable to move without his son’s permission, Jesus remained in place, savoring the experience, delighting that, after twelve long years he clearly understood that God sent the temple

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