History
In the year 1400 BC, God, to fulfill the promise He made to a man named Abraham, allowed some of his descendants, the Hebrews, to move into Palestine, displacing and conquering the local peoples or absorbing them into their culture. The new nation was named Israel, after the grandson of Abraham and the common ancestor of the Hebrews. For four hundred years, the Israelites lived in total conflict with the peoples around them, with many wars taking place, and victories and losses on both sides. Then, the people made a man named Saul king over the land. Saul did much to bring peace to the area, but it was his successor David that established Israel as the dominant power in the region. David and his son Solomon ruled over Israel for eighty years, leading the Golden Age of the nation.
Then, just after the death of Solomon, a civil war split the nation in two, the northern half retaining the name Israel and annonting their own king, and the southern taking the name Judah and keeping David's royal line. The next few hundred years were a time of conflict and apostasy, with both nations fighting with each other and those around them, and ignoring the God who had given them the land in the first place. During the reigns of David and Solomon, God had protected his people, but now they had abandoned Him, and broken the promise that bound the two together. To punish the Hebrews, God allowed their lands to be conquered, the northern kingdom falling to the Assyrian Empire in 722BC, and the southern kingdom submitting to Babylon 150 years later. However, God did this with two promises: that the nation of Israel would soon be able to return to its home; and that one man from David's royal line would be sent by God to rule over the kingdom and bring peace and prosperity to His people. Less than a century later, the first promise was fulfilled by the conqueror of Babylon, Cyrus the Great of Persia. The Israelites returned to their lands and settled there, but they were not autonomous, and were ruled by four successive empires: the Persians, the Greeks, the Ptolomies of Egypt, and the Seleucids of Syria.
In about 175BC, a man named Antiochus became the Seleucid king. He declared himself to be God, and, in 167, ordered that a pig be sacrificed in the Temple of the Lord in Jerusalem. When one Jew volunteered to do the job, a man named Mattathias Maccabbee stepped forward and killed him, then killed the Seleucid officer in town. This sparked a revolt, and for the next few years a bitter war was fought, with Mattathias' son Judah leading the Israelites. The war ended with Israel attaining her independence, but they would only bear it for a hundred years until the ever-expanding Rome took it into their own empire.
These were the times when the second prophecy God had made so many hundreds of years before began to be fulfilled.
A person is merely a body inhabited by an immortal soul, a spirit. Around the year 4 BC, a piece of God, who is spirit, inhabited his own body, and was born to a virgin girl named Mary, who was of the royal line of David. His Hebrew name was Joshua, but the Greek form, by which we call him today, was Jesus. The name meant "The Lord Saves." Jesus grew up as a carpenter in the town of Nazereth, but around the year 27AD he decided it was time to leave the life he had lived and be what he was born to be. He began to teach, and soon he gained a large following, making twelve of them close students, disciples, teaching them everything he could. He healed many diseases with a word and a touch, cast demons out of men and women, and raised some from the dead. All the while he taught of a Spiritual Kingdom of God, founded in the hearts and souls of men. He taught of love, and forgiveness, and compassion. And he told the people many times who he was. "I AM," he said. I am God. In all his life, he never broke a law, never did anything wrong. One thing he did do, though, was enrage the Jewish religious leaders.
Most religious leaders had become corrupt, taking their office as a matter of pride, not passion for the Lord. They got in many debates with Jesus, but each time they were defeated, and as time passed, more and more people began to believe that Jesus was the man that God had promised, the Messiah, or "Annointed One." The leaders did not want this.
Just before the festival of Passover, which honored God's deliverance of His people and His granting them of their own nation, the leaders, with the help of one of Jesus' twelve disciples, had Jesus arrested, and they turned him over to their Roman overlords, taking Jesus' teachings about a Kingdom of God and twisting them to make him appear to be a traitor and revolutionary. The Romans took Jesus, and at nine o'clock on a Friday morning, they nailed him to a large piece of wood in the shape of a cross, where he hung for six hours. By three o'clock, he was dead. To make sure of this, the Roman guards shoved a large spear up into his heart, bringing a flow of blood and water.
Though his followers didn't understand it at the time, this execution was what Jesus had been destined for all along. He never sinned, never did anything wrong, so when he died, God blamed every sin and wrongdoing in history on him. Jesus, God in the flesh, offered a gift to all those who would worship the one, true God: he took the punishment that we all deserved, so we would be free of blame when we died.
Jesus died Friday afternoon. A religious leader who believed that Jesus was who he said he was took the body and placed it in a nearby tomb. On Sunday morning, some women arrived at the tomb to embalm the body, but when they got there, he was gone. Jesus was alive. He appeared to each of his followers, and to the eleven disciples who had remained loyal to him. Not long after this, he returned to heaven, rising up into the clouds. Before he left, though, he told them three things. The first was a command, to go into the world and tell everybody about what he had done, to make them disciples, and to baptize them in his name. Secondly, he told them that he would soon be sending a Spirit, another piece of God, that would live in each of them and help them with their task. Third, he promised that he would someday return to earth and complete the prophecy, to rule over all of his people, a people who no longer inherited a place in his kingdom but could choose to be in it.
Soon after this, the eleven disciples chose another follower to replace the one who had betrayed Jesus. Then, later in the year, during another festival, the Spirit that Jesus had promised came upon the believers and gave them incredible power, gifts of the Spirit that would help them with the command Jesus had given. The body of believers, the church, began to grow.
And this is how things have been until today.
bravenet.com