Jesus knew his death was coming for some time. He had come for his own and his own rejected him at every turn. As it ended up, nothing had changed. Isaiah might be accepted as a prophet by Jesus’ generation, but despite the amazing supernatural gifts he displayed, Jesus would not be heeded in his own time. Instead of celebrating what Yahweh was doing through him via the power of the Holy Spirit, the religious leaders went the opposite way. Once he raised Lazarus from the dead, the religious leaders decided Jesus’ power was too great and they decided to kill him (Jn. 11:45–53). Jesus would now have to sneak around to stay alive (Jn. 11:54).
In time, one of his closest disciples would betray him with a kiss, possibly adding trauma to any coming kiss down the road as his human body kept the score. Once captured, he would be put in jail and abused by angry religious men who blindfolded him, slapped him, and mocked him (Lk. 22:63–65). Society would then turn on him in a mob-like fashion and have him abused, whipped, and turned over for capital punishment.
Jesus. The messenger of Yahweh. The prophet of prophets. The only innocent being ever to walk the heavens or the earth, now bleeding out on the electric chair as people laughed and mocked him. In their racism, the Romans crucified “just another Jew.” He was abused and lynched on a tree, his quivering nude body hanging there for all to see as they sexually harassed him.
In the name of Babel, the religious leaders have taken violent means to bring an end to the man who threatened the world as they knew it. They were determined to bring the Kingdom of Heaven to earth their own way, and Jesus was an obstacle preventing them from doing so. And so like every true prophet, Jesus died in the religious capital of Jerusalem (Lk. 13:33), for God’s people do not like Yahweh’s messengers—even if that messenger is Yahweh himself.
But Jesus’ favorite message of the Kingdom of Heaven would not die with him. For he was resurrected out of the underworld into a new immortal body that behaved in both human and angelic ways. The Son of Man and Son of God had been merged into a new kind of being, and his new body entered into the Kingdom of Heaven with the promise that he and his heavenly family would return one day and bring Heaven fully to earth. In the meantime, his followers were to keep busy by building his Kingdom in the here and now.
This is an excerpt from my shortest book, Supernatural Justice.
Jamin Bradley 
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