Information

We are living in the communication and information age. At this time, communicating with a person on the other side of the globe is as easy as talking to your next-door neighbor. It's about as easy to gather information as it is to gather oxygen. It has become as the song says "it's a small world after all." Plus, the invention of jets allows us to get to anywhere on the planet in two days, three at the most.

This has done a lot of things for the planet. For example, the information increase has allowed us to learn faster and easier than ever before, which makes knowledge available to nearly everyone. And when everyone has a basic understanding of the workings of the world, this helps prevent superstitions and false cures for disease that lead to worse ailments.

But there is also a problem with this constant flow of information. It has deculturized our world (I just made that word up, by the way. It means to remove all culture from something). Because we can get anywhere quickly, we have begun thinking that everyone is like us. This is not so. The cultures of the countries across the ocean differ from ours in sometimes enormous ways.

One thing in particular is often forgotten: Jesus was from one of the cultures differing the most from ours. The Middle East is nothing like the United States. The Middle East today is different than it was 2,000 years ago. So to properly understand Jesus, the culture He came from has to be understood.

I can't give you a good understanding of this. There's too much to learn, and I don't yet know a tenth of it all. But I can give you a little piece of information about His homeland.

Jesus was a Jew. The Jewish people have a complex history, which can be found in the Old Testament and the Apocrypha (as I said in another post, the Bible is the word of God. However, it is debated whether the Apocrypha is "inspired." Either way, though, it has been shown to be an accurate historical document). About one hundred years before His birth, there was a large war between the Hebrews and everyone else over how they could worship God. This can be read about in first and second Maccabees. Somehow, I must think that this was as important to them as our wars are to us.

What does this mean? Well, it's sort of like this: imagine that Hitler had won World War II. His grandson is ruling the world, killing people he doesn't like, destroying forests and causing many other problems. This is the kind of world Jesus was born into.

So what can be done with this? I don't really know, this is just what I wrote. Hopefully one of you can make some use of it.

Goodbye, valiant reader,
Mitchell