What Did Jesus Look Like?

I heard about a corn flake for sale on E-bay that is shaped like the state of Illinois. From what I understand, it is currently going for fifty dollars. Correction: I just checked with E-bay it’s going for way more than fifty bucks now. I understand that the girls selling it just wanted to by more frosted flakes, it looks like they may be able to pay their college tuition…
I’m just glad that it’s not a corn flake that looks like Jesus or Mother Mary. Pardon me if I sound cynical, but I get tired of people seeing a face or an image in a stain or something, and they are just convinced that they are seeing Jesus’ face (or His mother’s). Can I ask a question? How do you know what Jesus looked like? There weren’t any cameras then. The only paintings that we have were painted many generations later. The Bible never really describes Jesus’ appearance, except to say that He was not a handsome man (that, in and of itself, proves that every painting or image I have ever seen of Jesus is somewhat less than accurate).
The traditional image of Jesus shows Him with light-brown hair and blue eyes, neither attribute was common in the area at the time. I don’t think that Jesus came to Israel looking like an outsider. He would have had dark hair and eyes, and a somewhat dark complection, as well. I don’t mean dark as in He looked African, I mean dark as in Middle-Eastern.
To some extent, that’s speculation, but I think it has a logical basis. Generally the paintings that have been done of Jesus are based simply on the artist’s aesthetics. Well, I think Jesus looked like because that’s what I think looks good. Except Jesus isn’t supposed to look good… Traditionally, Jesus has been painted to look like the same ethic group as the artist. In more recent years, Jesus has been painted as a white man by artists of color simply because that’s the image of Jesus that they had been taught. Voltaire was right about the way we see God: “If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.”
I had one young man tell me once that he knew Jesus was black, because the Bible said He had hair like wool, and you don’t see white people with kinky hair. There are two basic problems with that: 1) it doesn’t say that Jesus hair was kinky like wool, it says Jesus’ hair was white like wool (is that where the idea of a blonde Jesus came from? I don't think it means that He was blonde, either), and, 2) many Middle-Easterners (and, truthfully, even some white people—it’s just not nearly as common) have kinky hair. I can’t argue that Jesus was white, I’m quite certain that he wasn’t. I do think that part of the reason that Jesus’ ethnicity isn’t expressly mentioned in Scripture is that God didn’t want us to feel that Jesus was only sent to one ethnic group. For God so loved the world, remember? We sing the song, “Red, brown, yellow, black, and white / They are precious in His sight; / Jesus loves the little children of the world.” We are all God’s children, no matter how different we may seem.

Trust

Trust can be a real issue for a lot of people. We don't trust each other, we don't trust our government, we don't trust anybody. Even people that mean well will eventually disappoint, or let you down because they are people. We are only human, none of us is perfect.

We are taught in the Scriptures that God is our Father. This can be problematic, at least for some people, because human fathers are, well, human. To compare God to a human father risks attributing fault to God. Even our own natural fathers are human and prone to failure; but the relationship we are supposed to have with them is similar to the relationship we should have with God. We as human beings have a bad tendency to attribute human qualities to non-humans. Sometimes we even humanize objects (that's easy to do with computers, but sometimes we even blame a piece of furniture for being in the way as if it had moved itself from where we left it--sometimes we even assign it a motive for moving...). Someone asked the question, "Why does a mirror reverse left and right and not up and down?" Let's do a thought experiment: Suppose that you are lying on your left side, facing a mirror; now left is down, and right is up. Move your right arm (your 'up' arm). Now, does your reflections 'up' arm move, or does its 'down' arm move? (If you have a hard time imagining this, try it and see how it comes out.) The 'up' arm, of course, because mirrors don't reverse up and down. Now, consider for a moment, isn't the arm that moved on your right (remember, right is up)? The problem isn't that mirrors reverse left and right, it's that we expect them to reverse left and right (the reflection looks like another person, and that other person's right should be to our left, but it isn't) and they don't reverse anything. This is just us, humanizing our own reflections.

We should not attribute human qualities to God, however. Aren't we created in God's image? Yes, in the sense that we are immortal souls, but, unlike God, we have mortal flesh that doesn't always agree with what is best for our souls. Voltaire once commented that, "If God created us in His own image, we have more than reciprocated." There is a certain logic to the idea that if God created us in His own image, then God must look like us, yet, most of what we think of as our defining characteristics aren't common to all of humanity. Some of are fair-complected, others are dark complected, many others are somewhere in-between; so what color is God? Again, God is a Spirit, He is not flesh and blood. We can, and should, trust God, because He is not a man, that He should lie; He is not a man that He should repent (or have anything to repent of, except for creating us). Don't misunderstand me, I know that there are times when God has changed His mind (usually because of something than one or more of us human beings has done), but as far as Him having done something evil and having to repent of that, no, that's never happened.

The Afterlife (part 2)

I posted about the afterlife one day last week (here), but I didn't address the fact that some people don't believe that there is an after life, and some believe that there is an afterlife only for the chosen few.

Obviously I'm not going to change the minds of anyone who doesn't believe in life after death. The Bible says that man was created in God's image. I happen to like what Voltaire said about that, "If God has made us in his image, we have returned him the favor." People have a tendency to think that if we were created in God's image, then God must look like us. That makes sense, as far as it goes, but, then, what does God look like? Is He black, white, or Asian? Is He blonde, brunette, or redhead? The answer, of course, is, yes, He is; and, yet, He's not. It is a mistake to think that God has a physical being, John 4:24 tells us that He is a Spirit. How does a physical being take on the image of a spiritual being? In Genesis, chapter 2, it tells us that we are created as immortal souls. So, our spirit is like God's Spirit: immortal, never ending. But God told Adam and Eve that they could die. In the physical sense they could, just as we can. Jesus told Martha that anyone who believed in Him would never die; but He was talking about Lazarus, who was already in the grave. John 3:16 says that believers should not perish, but have everlasting life.

What about non-believers? Well, non-believers have the same immortal soul that believers have, the difference is whether spending eternity in Hell really counts as 'life.' Some people believe that if one dies outside of the will of God, then one would just go in the ground and that would be the end of it; their spirit is extinguished. Part of me wishes I could believe that, but, to be honest, if I did, I would have committed suicide a long time ago. There have been times in my life that I felt it would have been better for me if I had simply ceased to exist. I suspect that is why Job wished that he had never been born. His wife suggested death as an option, but he rebuked her. I suspect that he knew that his death would only make things worse for him.

There are a number of times that Jesus talked about life after death for non-believers: In Matthew 8, Matthew 13, Matthew 22, Matthew 24, Matthew 25, and Luke 16 He talked about punishment awaiting those that do not make it into Heaven. (Side note: The parable of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke 16 I think is particularly interesting, first because, out of all the parables he told, Lazarus is the only person that He named. The rich man indicates that if he can't get anything for himself, he would at least like for his family members to be warned, that they not have to join him. He asked that Lazarus be raised from the dead for his brothers' sake. Abraham tells him that they should hear Moses and the prophets; the rich man protests that if one were raised from the dead... In the course of Jesus' ministry, Jesus was raised from the dead, but so was a man named Lazarus... It also strikes me that, as bad as the rich man had it, the one thing that could have made it worse would have been to have someone that he cared about join him in the pit.) The standard argument there, is that those are all parables, those are not things that actually happened. As far as I am concerned, that means that we should pay even more heed to them. Remember that parables are stories that Jesus used to try to make a point. He chose the situations, and the characters in His stories to illustrate spiritual things to the carnally minded. What is He trying to teach in these parables if not that the righteous have an eternal reward, and the wicked have an eternal punishment? Besides, Luke 13 is not a parable, and it makes it pretty clear that people who don't make it into Heaven aren't simply going to cease to exist. Matthew 18 (and Mark 9) is not a parable, and it talks about an 'everlasting fire;' if we simply ceased to exist, eventually that fire would run out of things to burn, wouldn't it?

Of course, one belief that persists is that Hell is really only temporary; that it will only exist until judgment, as suggested in 1 Peter. My question would be, how much torment are you prepared to endure, just on the proposition that it is only temporary; without even knowing how long 'temporary' might be (days, months, years, centuries, millennea)? Further, although Hell is temporary, in Revelations it says that Hell will be cast into the lake of fire. Sort of like, out of the frying pan...