Mankind has struggled with the notion of a higher power, an omnipotent all-powerful being we have all come to know as God, in one form or fashion, since the beginning of time when tiny “humans” emerged from the soup of the earth and began worshipping the stars, moon, sun and all the elements of Mother Earth, along with Her various and wondrous creatures – the wooly mammoths and bears and saber-tooths of the land. And today, as we Christians prepare to celebrate the defeat of death by Jesus, Our Lord and Savior, one cannot deny that we follow but one of several major religions on earth, and therefore, as much as we may know we have the Word of the One True God, it is and always has been a matter of faith, more than anything any one person can prove.

I was born into the Christian faith and never missed a church service on Sundays and Wednesdays until I reached the age of thirteen, when I took a strong, rebellious path against organized religion and denied the existence of God, even as I knew then my own denial was false. It took some time, but I eventually returned to what I knew in my heart was true and returned to God in my own way through His guidance and at His appointed time.

It was often a hard thing to weather — the insistent, overbearing, harsh manner of some pastors, especially those Missionary Baptists, who would get right in a person’s face so you could smell their morning breakfast on their breath, as they shouted and spit the words, “Have you accepted Jesus Christ into your life as your Lord and Savior?”

One may deny Jesus as the One True God, but it’s mighty hard to deny the existence of a god, a higher power. All one need do is to peer through a telescope out across our universe and across one galaxy to the next into the next universe, and on and on – study one lone tree and its stand of trees and all the surrounding forests and the wildlife spawned within – peer into the eyes of a newborn baby and witness the birth of any wild animal, to understand that life itself is a miracle and there definitely exists something greater than us all.

I am a Christian by choice, through my own free will, that which was given me by God, and I follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, to the best of my abilities, still falling far short on any given day of the week. And I do so as a matter of faith.

Some people rail against the existence of God for their entire existence, but for many more, a time arrives when everything comes into focus at a decisive time in their lives that changes them forever, in a dramatic life-determining way that moves them to accept Jesus as their Savior. And when one comes to God, it makes everything bright and new and seen through a brand new light.

The Old Rugged Cross

Jesus Christ came to Earth to show mankind a new and better way to live. He sacrificed Himself on the cross to save us from our sins, but not before he taught love, forgiveness and a moral path that rejected the evil of this world and all that Satan puts before us to tempt us to reject God and claim ourselves as gods on earth. And He told us that:

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.” [John 3:16-17 King James Bible]

Through Jesus Christ, a New Covenant was made between God and Mankind.

We are told in Ecclesiastes that we cannot know the ways of God. I know nothing of God, and yet I know everything about God through my faith.

If Jesus had come to earth during more modern times and had died in an electric chair or under the guillotine, I wonder if we’d all be wearing miniatures of these rather than the Cross.

By way of faith and, in this case, certain, definitive and provable fact, I know that Jesus wasn’t a “palestinian”, just as I know that Mary Magdalene, one of His most faithful followers who was once known as “the Thirteenth Disciple”, was not a whore, as she is most often confused with Mary of Bethany, who was. And He wouldn’t pronounce His name “Issa” as the Arab Muslims of today do; He was a Jew, the King of Jews in fact and the Messiah come to earth in the form of a man by his own admission, before Pontius Pilate.

There isn’t any mention of a country named “palestine” in the New Testament or any other historical records written during the times of Jesus. This is and always has been a propagandist’s construct aimed at demeaning and erasing Jewish history and culture, to deny Jews their right to sovereignty in Israel.

Over a century after the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, around 135 A.D., the Roman army massacred and expelled a massive number of Jews from Judea – the area that is now called Israel – after they stopped the third Jewish uprising. The Romans renamed it Syria Palaestina as a way to insult and further punish the Jews by using a name derived from Philistia, the land of the Philistines, a people originally from the coastline of what is now modern-day Greece and Turkey and the Biblical enemies of the Jewish people. One must note that David killed Goliath and the Philistines disappeared centuries before the birth of Jesus.

You wouldn’t find Jesus hiding behind little Arab Muslim children with an AK47 if He were alive today, or burying missiles and grenade launchers underneath hospitals, because he followed a righteous path in all things – His own commandments and all that made sense in conjunction with those commandments as described in the legal codes of man. You wouldn’t find him assaulting young Jewish people on the way to class either or chanting slogans that favored Hamas Muslim terrorists’ campaign to destroy Jews and Judaism in Israel. And He certainly wouldn’t be waging an unjust war on innocents, who were trying to live quietly in peace.

Poor Mary, Mary Magdalene – she was one of the few people who loved Jesus and was still able to suffer and stand by, as she maintained a fearless fortitude and watched His own suffering and death upon the Cross. She was one of only two to see Him resurrected at His tomb, Jesus’s Mother being there also, and she was the first to bear witness to the truth of His resurrection. But unfortunately, the heretics, sacrilegious, atheists and even poorly educated Christians too often still recall her as a former whore, rather than a true heroine of the Christian faith.

And then there is the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, who was herself entered the world by way of an immaculate conception and a virgin birth, the child of Anna [Hebrew Hannah] and Joachim, legally espoused to Joseph by way of Jewish law and tradition of the time. God preserved Her and made her to enter the world free from the Original Sin, in order that she would later serve as the perfect vessel to bring Jesus into the world, to walk as a man in the world and experience all that came with being in the flesh — Jesus, the man from Galilee, Jesus of Nazareth, Son of the Holy Spirit.

Mary, Mother of God, was a direct descendant of King David, a daughter of the royal family, and she herself and all her close friends knew this to be true, despite the fact that she was poor and had little standing in Nazareth before she gave birth to Jesus.

Mary, blessed are they who believe in your son, the Son of God come to Earth. How do you keep faith in how Jesus came to be, many surely asked back in those days. Could this child who once peed out in back of your home truly be the Son of God?

As we find in the Bible, Luke 1:30-35:

“And the angel [Gabriel] said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God. And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end. Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.”

In the infancy of the Gospels, Christian doctrine saw the Virgin Birth as one of the most controversial aspects of Christian Doctrine. According to the Gospel of James, a second century infancy Gospel that was later rejected by the First Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D., Mary is twelve when she is betrothed to Joseph, and somewhere between twelve and seventeen when she conceives, depending on which manuscript one reads. At first Joseph does not believe that his wife has been faithful to him, and he throws himself to the ground and bitterly weeps, as he asks, “Who is he who has deceived me? Who did this evil thing in my house and defiled her?” Then Mary weeps and says that she is pure. Joseph wonders whether he should hide her sin or expose her and have her killed, but that night in a dream an Angel of the Lord comes to him and tells him that the child is from the Holy Spirit. But neither Joseph’s or Mary’s problems are over. The priests remain skeptical.

Sweet little Mary, how did you deal with so many enemies who didn’t believe you, as you rode your donkey into Bethlehem – with your large, swollen belly and the birthing pains beginning. And yet, you and Joseph remained strong together as Jesus entered the world in a manger.

If Jesus were here today, I suspect he would be turning over tables in the Vatican or at the Southern Baptist Convention, where moral relativism has taken a grip and turned its congregations away from the True Word of God as IT is written. He was all about forgiveness, but only after one truly repented and refrained from falling back into the same pattern of sin, and so, while He may still love the homos and the murderers, simply as His creations, He does not accept their recidivism and their continued rebellion against His Kingdom, nor would He stand by silent in the face of little UnBorn Babies being murdered in the womb.

The fake Christians have a long way to go to make themselves right in the eyes of God, those among us who go to church on Sunday and cry and beg for mercy as they profess their love and adoration for Jesus and then step right back out into their usual sinful ways on Monday.

Many say that Jesus’s promise of salvation for us all comes simply from our true belief in Him as the One True God, without meeting any other steps or requirements. After Paul and Silas saved a jailer’s life, he asked them how he could receive eternal life. They both responded, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.” [Acts 16:30-31] But numerous other Scriptures explain that continuing with sinful and rebellious ways can result in our salvation being taken away from us by God, even if we have professed our belief in Him.

Two in particular stand out, starting with Hebrews 10:26-31 which reads:

“For if we sin wilfully after we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins. But a certain fearful looking for of judgement and fiery indignation, which shall devour the adversaries. he that despised Moses’ law died without mercy under two or three witnesses: Of how much sorer punishment, suppose ye, shall he be thought worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified, an unholy thing, and hat done despite unto the Spirit of grace? For we know him that hath said, Vengeance belongeth unto me, I will recompense, saith the Lord. And again, The Lord shall judhe his people. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

2 Peter 2:20-21 reads:

“For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overpowered, the last state has become worse for them than the first. For it would have been better for them never to have known the way of righteousness than after knowing it to turn back from the holy commandment delivered to them.”

In other words, most of us will still stand before God to face His final judgement upon the day of our death and departure from this world.

RELATED: New Discovery at Site of Jesus’ Resurrection Corroborates the Bible

So many people are ill-informed on the ways of Our Father in Heaven, or they have never really been taught the Gospel as it used to be taught in the old-style churches across the South, whether we speak of the Church of God or the Baptists. They stay mired in the chaos of this world and lacking in a clear vision of Our Father in Heaven, seeing without eyes to see, hearing the words of the Gospel with no understanding, while their double-mindedness keeps them in a waking sleep and prey to troubled dreams and prone to following false ways and false prophets.

In these harried days, we see people flittering about, fleeing in fear from one thing or another, lacking strength and resolve and any belief in anything good, righteous and of God, while they go about the business of living each day. They inflict blows and abuse upon one another, both mental and physical, as some climb to high stations in life, only to be brought back down to earth by the envious and bruised and battered, believing others seek their deaths even though no one pursues them. Sometimes they really are killing those standing in front or beside them, much as we saw in our country between 2014 and 2020 during the Troubled Times [still ongoing], running away stained in one another’s blood.

And this is the nature of man and will be the way even going forward towards the end of this century, until the people, who are passing through all these things and have experienced all these confusions and divisiveness, awake to the emptiness of their troubled dreams that have led them astray and cast them off along with their ignorance and sheep-like ways, finding a path to Our Father in Heaven and embracing His teachings as a new breath of fresh air, a new light and a new dawn for themselves and their progeny.

Happy is the man or woman who comes to himself or herself and awakens. Indeed, blessed are they who have opened the eyes of the blind.

With all the words we know Jesus uttered by way of historical accounts and the Bible itself, it’s hard not to wonder about all the many thousands of conversations He may have had with followers and nonbelievers alike before He sacrificed Himself upon the cross.

One can almost hear Jesus saying something of great significance that didn’t make it into the written record.

“For this reason, I say to my loved ones: Hearken to my words which I proclaim to thee. Hold fast to the good and decent works within this life and all its associated wonders and the Word of God. Endure persecutions and temptations, which will come to you, and fortify yourselves in the Commandments which I gave to you, that you may escape that second death – the death of your soul — and these last bonds in which there is no hope of life that you may avoid my righteous wrath and the agonizing end of the deniers and blasphemers who have seen the Truth with their own eyes and turned away from it.

Those who deny me and turn away from me shall enter a place of punishment, Hell as it is and the Lake of Fire where life of any kind no longer really exists, never to witness the shining Light of Truth again. The wind and the air shall be taken from them, and they shall receive no breath of life from that hour onward, as they are reminded with each passing moment of the good parts of life they squandered, when given an opportunity to please Me and follow My righteous wisdom and commandments set forth in The Word, never to taste the sweetness of pure water and a morning’s dew, and they will pray to be back in God’s good graces again and wrapped in His love.”

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” [Genesis]

And as we are told in John 1:6-13:

“There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe. He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.

That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.”

I have faith and I believe, and that’s good enough for me, no matter what others may say or choose to do with their lives. May millions more step to the front of America’s churches this Easter and heed the altar call to accept Jesus Christ into their lives as their Lord and Savior.

Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus

April 16, 2025

~ The Author ~
Justin O. Smith has lived in Tennessee off and on most of his adult life, and graduated from Middle Tennessee State University in 1980, with a B.S. and a double major in International Relations and Cultural Geography – minors in Military Science and English, for what its worth. His real education started from that point on. Smith is a frequent contributor to the family of Kettle Moraine Publications.