If Jesus Had Been Born in 1983

If Jesus had been born in 1983, his disciples would have had smart phones, and they would have kept the tape rolling 24/7. Matthew would have had a YouTube channel; John (when he remembered his charger) would have been the poetic photographer on Instagram; Luke would have stayed up late publishing transcripts on his blog; Mark would have been throwing out video clips of miracles in real time on Facebook Live.

But the Sovereign God of the Universe chose to be born in a time when it was possible to pour his most intimate ministry years out into the waste of unrecorded days. He chose to live in flesh among us during a season of history in which human memory and emotion would have to process and then retell the most important stories of God’s intersection with humanity.

That’s a risky, interesting choice, if you think about it. Whatever revelation involves, the diversity of the four gospels (and especially three) shows us that God decided to allow his reality to be expressed through the nuances of human personality.

Had the Savior shown up just two thousand years later, we could have had a watertight, linear account of nearly everything he spoke (while reformed apologists would have gone mad trying to fit every single word into a systematic theology). Instead, when God engaged with humans, he let human emotions and ideas help tell the story of how that interaction took place.

Whatever inerrancy means, it isn’t generic. God didn’t strip John of his poetic nature. He didn’t remove Mark’s tendency to rush things, or Luke’s soft spots for the marginalized, or Matthew’s tendency to be a little OCD. Jesus loved his friends in slow time, in community, and then God’s Spirit helped those men find words to explain what their experiences with him were like. In the process of revelation, God didn’t produce a bland, robotic narrative. He gave real men sincere testimonies that both align and digress to create something incredibly intimate.

When Jesus chose to invest Himself primarily in teaching twelve men, he wasn’t choosing persona management or platform building but the risk of honest relationship. He let his message be told through a tiny handful of people, let the gospel slow cook at 98.6 degrees for 2000 years, and here we are.

That's astounding, if you think about how so much ministry is done these days. When we strategize to create CEO-driven mega churches or massive online platforms--when we obsess about numbers of followers, or blog hits, or networking, we concern ourselves with priorities that Jesus never seemed to worry about.

He lived beautifully, obscurely. He trusted his biggest sacrifices, his most artistic, flawless teachings, to the transmission of the sort of crude and imperfect people you and I pass by every single day.

Freeing. Reorienting. Convicting. Astounding.


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Additional Note: I generally tend to use the term "apostle" to refer to the inner twelve and the word "disciple" to refer to followers of Christ beyond that small group. At least some scholars believe that the author of Mark's gospel was with the group of 70 sent out by Jesus in Luke 10, a man who abandoned Jesus for a time and was restored later. However, there's also quite a bit of debate about authorship for this book. I didn't I think I had room to get into all that in a post this small, so I tried to just keep it concise. Also, I didn't include the betrayal of Judas or the addition of Matthias because I was afraid it would distract from the main point. For those of you who haven't ever studied this, though, you can find the story of Matthias in the book of Acts, Chapter 1.