A sound

 of battle is in the land, and of great destruction.  Jeremiah 50:22

  In the old days, people gathered as congre-gation, they heard from people who studied God's Word where they, in that time period, were at.  The prophet people relayed history to date....where the people had gotten off track, how they adjusted course, and where they hadn't.  God was in charge the whole time.  Whether the people were remembering to care about each other and tend commitments, Commandments, or whether they were fighting each other, fighting selves, fighting with God, God was in charge the whole time.

  The prophets were not the only people in the congregation.  Prophets were bards and mediatrix.  They would mediate all the voices of the congregation and pray about all tensions and causes to celebrate.  They would listen.  God would indicate through the process of being in the role of prophet, best practice; things on the horizon; changes that could be made; God's....'through-line'.

  God had been quite dramatic about certain things, like WHO is God; WHO made everything; HOW not God beings had witnessed and experienced again and again not being God.  All through the Old Testament, the bedrock of the New Testament God makes decisions.  And free will allows for everybody and everything else to abide by God's decisions, or

  Way back in the Garden of Eden, the apple is placed in the story as a symbol.  God had said, Stay off that tree's fruit!  Kind of like the Ten Commandments say, Thou shalt not kill.  And what happened?  The also symbolized "evil" tempts and persuades; the non-God beings Adam and Eve stray from their union/commitment with God.  They can't then.  They can't continue in perfect union with God.  They trespassed.  God made decision.

  Much time passed.  Some say God felt lonely too.  That He came up with a reparation plan.  That plan was Jesus.  God would send his only son-also-God, Jesus, to teach the world about "love" and "forgiveness".

    By the earth time that Jesus came, humanity was quite wandered away from ideal.  Jesus had lots of material to work with in explaining why his/our father reprimands, chastises, requires people to admit or confess up to doing against God; forgetting about God; worshipping other things; hurting self and others; wreaking havoc.  Even knowingly and unknowingly joining up with evil, people do.  

  Jesus and those first disciples lived by example.  Yes, they affirmed, there's human condition.  But greater than all that misery and confusion, ecstasy and passion, greater even than violence and death and evil, is God.  I AM, God had spent a lot of time explaining.  And then sent a part of himself to walk with for a time.

  Part of why Jesus cried so hard before his suffering and crucifixion transpired was because even as the son of God, he could not change all the people into peaceful; He had to accept God's decision(s) too.  People and darker spiritual forces (the forms of evil) were not accepting God as ultimate.  Jesus also taught that God's got long, long term plans.  As one lifetime humans (part of the condition), all of us, even Jesus as a soul in a human body, only have so much time here.

  Jesus devoted himself.  He glimpsed and felt the entire human experience; prayed and committed to absolute faith, being in God's hands...he dedicated his suffering and human death to the overarching principle of the forgiveness of sin.  In his devotion to God AND to the human family, Jesus translated the power of mercy and love; He mediated a way.