Truth That Counts: Jesus as the Life-Giving, Living Branch

Just about anyone aware of Jesus will tell you that He is the guy Christians believe was God incarnate--"Immanuel, God with us"--among the Jews about two thousand years ago. The man in the New Testament those books are about. I think He is a whole lot more than that.

We variously translate the Hebrew word Jesus (Y'shua/Yeshua) as Savior, God's Salvation, God is Salvation, Yahweh Saves, Salvation of the Lord, God Saving (Us), etc.  But He is a man, right? Whether as God incarnate, an otherwise normal human being, or a symbolic philosophical construction, we see Jesus as a man. I am interested in the translation Victor Alexander gives the Aramaic word Eashoa (ee-show) in Mark 1:1, "the Life-Giving, Living Branch." This is automatically more than a man. We are now talking about the living branch of some greater living thing which gives life. This is a force, a universal energy, a quality of the nature of God. "Jesus," or "Eashoa," is the branch of THAT. AND WE ARE BRANCHES OF HIM. YOU are a shoot of the Life-Giving, Living Branch, a bud. 

The New Testament authors have this force or energy as one with man and reaching to the depths of what we call darkness (hello, scribes and Pharisees) and comprehensibly dying FOR it, AS it (for "it" is Itself), to redeem it to Life again. How the (vernacular expression deleted) do you deconvert from that? "Oh, but the Bible is not scientifically accurate, and there are contradictions in the stories told to illustrate man's experience with this force." Waa, waa, waa.

Well, if you can't find evidence of the Life-Giving, Living Branch in your church, go somewhere else. Or go it alone. The Life-Giving, Living Branch is here for YOU. YOU can deal with it one-on-One. It is certainly capable, and It can make you capable, too, for It is not separate from you. It is as easy as stretching out your heart in desire to hear Eashoa, and listening to the thoughts that come.