Good News about Jesus Christ: Homework

Thanks for reading the study material in Good News About Jesus Christ. Welcome to our Good News is for Sharing Homework Pages.

If you don’t have a Bible in e-format, you can click here for online access to a free complete Bible in translations for several different languages.

This page has two sections: Getting Straight Information and Getting Straight Answers.

In the first section, we will ask you clarifying questions and help you begin to work out the information you’ve read in Good News About Jesus Christ.

“Exploring the Issues” will help you to identify what you already believe, based on what you already know or don’t know about the Bible’s presentation of Jesus Christ. This will help you establish a marker, a reference point for your further learning. To know where you’re going, it helps to know where you’ve come from!

“Getting the Straight Story” will help you to make sure you understand the Bible study material.

“Working It Into Your Life” will help you figure out what all this means for your daily life.

The second section of this document works like an “answer key” for the Getting Straight Information and Working It Into Your Life sections of this lesson.

We have not included suggested answers for “Exploring the Issues” section because these questions are intended to help you think about your own ideas. We hope this process will help you compare Good News with what you presently believe.

You will find our suggested answers to the True/False sections, and also some of the reasons why we believe these answers. We hope that providing this will help you understand and evaluate the content of Good News.

The “Working It Into Your Life” questions can help you sort out what Good News means in real life.

We’ve included some of our own thoughts as a general guide to the direction we believe Good News is intended to take us. You can use the “Leave a Reply” section on this page to share your impressions and views on these questions, too.

Thank you for letting us share in your journey.

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EXPLORING THE ISSUES

The purpose of this section is to help you examine what you presently believe about Jesus Christ and how it affects your life.

What do I think about Jesus Christ? (Check as many as apply.)

_____ I never thought much about Him.

_____ I’m not sure that such a person ever existed.

_____ I’m sure that Jesus existed, but I don’t know if everything Christians say about Him is true.

_____ He was a great moral philosopher/teacher like the Buddha or Muhammad, but no more a human-divine Saviour than they were.

_____ I’ve always believed in Jesus Christ, but I have not known exactly what I should believe about Him.

_____ I’ve always believed in Jesus Christ, and I have a clear idea of what He’s all about from my association with organized religion.

What is Jesus Christ like?

What “picture” do you have in mind of Him? Where did your impression come from?

What about Jesus is the most interesting/attractive to you?

What about Him is most confusing/unappealing to you?

If Jesus Christ were to meet you in person, how would He treat you? What would He think of you? How would you feel?

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GETTING THE STRAIGHT STORY

This section of the course is designed to help you gain a clearer understanding of what the Bible has to say about Jesus Christ.

Your picture of Jesus Christ will strongly influence your picture of God. It will also affect your sense of Jesus as a positive or negative role-model for living. To get your life “on-target,” your picture of Jesus needs to be “on-target.”

A. True or False: All are answerable either “T” or “F.” There are no “middle ground” questions in this section. All the questions and answers are in the Gospel of Mark.

1. _____ Jesus protected himself by avoiding undesirable and sinful people.

2. _____ Jesus’ mission was mainly social and political: to set up God’s Kingdom with good laws, and a just and tolerant society, to create a progressive society.

3. _____ Jesus taught a very definite spiritual way, and insisted that His was the only correct one.

4. _____ Jesus’ main concern was helping people get right with God and do right to other people. He was building new networks of sharing and friendship where none existed before. He was bringing the future Great Day into now.

5. _____ People always liked Jesus. He never did anything offensive. It was easy to agree with Him.

6. _____ The religious leaders of Jesus’ day were among His greatest admirers – they supported His work.

7. _____ One of Jesus’ biggest problems was how people generally, especially His closest followers, misunderstood Him and what He was trying to do.

8. _____ Because of its Christian heritage, Western society understands Jesus very well and follows Him.

9. _____ Jesus was more concerned with helping people overcome the personal damage of living in a broken world, than He was with displaying His power to impress people.

10. ____ Jesus didn’t come down from the cross, because He couldn’t. His power was gone.

11. ____ Jesus told His followers that He would die on a cross and be raised, but they failed to understand.

12. ____ After Jesus returned to heaven, He continued to work with people to help them know God.

B. Correcting the True/False Write a brief correct answer for any “False” statements in Part “A” above. Where you can, refer directly to the Bible story in question. Scroll down to the second section to see our suggested answers.

C. Working It Into Your Life These questions will help you to bring the information about God closer to your everyday life. Scroll down on this page to see what we would suggest.

Based on what you’ve learned about God’s character from “Good News About God,” if God were to live among people “in person,” what would He be like?

What would be most important to Him?

How would He treat people who were “off-target,” sinful?

Based on what the Genesis stories show about people, how would you expect people to treat “God in person”?

In what ways do the life of Jesus and the way people treated Him agree with what one could expect? How do they not agree?

If people really did crucify the Son of God, and if Jesus was really raised from the dead, what does this imply about sin? about people? about God?

If Jesus was really raised from the dead, what does this imply about His claims about Himself? about His teachings? about life and death? about God?

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GETTING STRAIGHT INFORMATION

To correctly answer the True/False section requires reading the Gospel of Mark and the references listed in the Gospel of John, along with the course material.

B. Correcting the True/False

1. False Jesus protected Himself by doing all He could to stay faithful to God and God’s heart for reaching out to people. “It’s not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick” (2.17). His relationship with God empowered Him to help people, instead of requiring Him to avoid them. This was completely different from the view of religious people of His time.

2. False Jesus did help ordinary people come to know God, and that changed their lives. His teaching was directed toward people, not government or social structures. He did nothing on a social-political level to try to force government to improve people’s situation. That’s part of why religious leaders rejected Him in the end — they wanted a Messiah who would change politics, not people’s hearts. They wanted power and wealth, but not God’s work in their own personal lives.

3. True Jesus was not “religious” in the “normal way”: He wasn’t trying to get people to do more religious activities. He was against the religious establishment, because they misrepresented God and mistreated people. But He was very definite about calling people to an explicit, exclusive “discipleship” (8.27-38). Jesus did not promote the “individualist way” of following one’s own value system. Jesus’ true followers were to learn from Him and obey Him. He did not force people to follow Him.

4. True One of the most striking facts of Jesus’ ministry is the absolute value He put on the lives of individual people. No one is insignificant. His aim was for people to become everything God had designed them to be. That included meeting their needs in God, and helping them to be people who could make a difference for other people to know God. He always cared for individual people more than the opinion of the crowds.

5. False It was not always easy to agree with Jesus. Much of what He said was very challenging to put into practice, because it involved making profound changes in one’s approach to life. He said and did many things that offended the religious leaders’ sense of what God wanted from people. Jesus was not a “nice, easygoing man whose chief virtues were tolerance and sweetness.” He did and said what He knew had to be done and said, regardless of the cost to Himself personally. His own family rejected Him, most likely embarrassed by the controversy He had generated (3.21)

6. False The religious leaders should have known better, since they were the scholars of the Bible, which foretold of Jesus and what He was going to be like. However, they operated much more out of fear and status-protection than they did the principles of the Bible, and so they completely missed Him. In fact, they regularly followed Him around and tried to undermine what He was doing by slandering Him (3.22). It was ultimately their plotting which brought Him to trial and execution by the Roman governor (3.6).

7. True The Gospel of Mark is mostly a story about Jesus and His disciples. The ancient Jews had so many false hopes and expectations of the Messiah-King that it was very difficult for Jesus to get people to understand Him. Most of Mark is Jesus trying to help His closest followers understand: they didn’t understand and so were making critical mistakes in their lives and ministry (see chs. 8-10 especially).

8. False Like the problem of the ancient Jews, our heritage has led us into false images of Jesus and consequently false impressions of what He is about and what it takes to follow Him. Some of these include the “anemic Jesus” who can’t stand up to life, the “stern Jesus” who doesn’t want people to enjoy life, the “religious Jesus” who has a long list of useless rules, the “miracle-mongering Jesus” who will give you anything you want if you follow the right formula to call on Him, etc. Our heritage has had such an admixture of tradition and other tampering that no one could get to know Jesus by following Western culture. The false impressions of what it takes to follow Him are unattractive to most thinking people who see the imbalances and uselessness of these alternatives.

9. True His miracles were all done to meet the needs of people. He never gave impressive power displays such as flying, invisibility, invincibility, etc., which would have really attracted attention. The reason for that is that God’s power is never used by God that way. People worship power, and want it for their own uses. Jesus always intended for His power to point to God’s love for people, and for the power itself to be strictly secondary.

10. False Jesus didn’t come down from the cross (ch. 15) because if He had, people would have followed Him for His power instead of God’s love for them. He voluntarily stayed there, against all human sense, because in His death was the key to people returning to God. For Him to come down would have been for Him to use God’s power for Himself, which is the one thing He had to not do to be consistent with God’s character.

11. True At least 3 times in Mark Jesus tried to explain to His followers what was going to happen to Him, but their expectations and their personal agendas blinded them from understanding Him (8-10). Naturally they couldn’t believe the stories they heard from others that He was raised from the dead – not until they had seen Him for themselves.

12. True See 16.20. To this day Jesus continues to work with people to help them find God, who is looking for them. He does this now, not in a single body as before, but through His life in many people who follow Him, living with the same perspective, values, and relationship with God that He had.

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C. Working It Into Your Life

These notes will give you a general idea of the direction Good News is designed to lead you. You’ve probably written down many other considerably valuable insights which aren’t referred to in the following paragraphs. We hope that these are helpful for you.

1. Your answers might sound like the response to Jesus of various people in the stories. One could expect to think of Jesus as warm, compassionate, welcoming, etc. Certainly that was how people who recognized their needs saw Him. People who thought they already had everything they needed felt threatened by Jesus, and perceived Him as deceitful, power- hungry, etc. Many people probably sensed a combination of things: they would be afraid of someone who could tell the truth in such a straightforward manner, and seemed to have His own life in order, and yet at the same time be attracted to His kindness. What made the difference in their response and subsequent view of Jesus was their decision about their own needs.

2. People getting to know God was clearly Jesus’ top priority. The personal well-being of people in terms of health, wealth, social standing, etc. was secondary. People needed the truth He came to reveal to get right with God (1.35-38). People treating each other the way God treats them was a close second priority (12.29-31). Jesus was deeply moved by the faith of some people, because it proved that they really understood God (12.41- 44); He was irate about the walls that the religious establishment had built which prevented people from knowing God (11.12-18; 12.38-40).

3. Jesus offered all of them an opportunity to “start over,” to learn a new way of life. He offered more than compassion and friendship, though. He offered them truth so that their lives could be built on a sure foundation; some people didn’t want it (5.1-17). He used the word-pictures of a “doctor” and “the sick” (2.17), instead of a prosecutor and a criminal. People are both the victims of sin and the perpetrators of it. Jesus had a balanced response that dealt with both sides of the issue.

4. In Genesis people were divided about God. Some “called on His name” and trusted Him. Others sinned by ignoring or disobeying God. In some cases they tried to establish themselves without Him. They followed an independent course which destroyed people and led to disaster. In Mark people have the opportunity to deal with God more directly. Expect sin to be as bad as it can get. Expect all the natural fear and hostility toward God that sin builds into people to come out in full force. Expect some people to declare that they need God and change dramatically as they follow Jesus. But don’t expect all the “natural goodness of the human spirit” to “humbly welcome its Creator.”

5. This author believes that the Old Testament view of sin and people makes what happened to Jesus completely understandable. The real shock comes when one realizes that the internal dynamics of sin which crucified Christ (e.g. self-protection, hostility to truth, anger at unmet demands and expectations, deceit, etc.) live in everyone. Jesus did exactly what one would expect God in person to do, and people did exactly what sin would drive people to do to Him. If Jesus had come in our generation, we would have ended up doing to Him something very similar to what the ancient people did.

6. If humans really did crucify the Son of God, it means that sin, the dynamic which caused it, is not simply a mistake: it’s absolutely hideous. Sin twists people out of all reality and leads them to do what they would never in their right mind do. It means that sin has absolutely nothing to offer that is good, no matter how it looks. It means that people are very vulnerable to sin, and are not naturally good enough to see their way through it to do right. Sin is stronger than people.

God has gone as far as He can go to get through to people. If people reject God in the flesh, sin will have ruined them beyond repair or hope. For God to permanently separate them from Himself will be the only alternative.

If God raised Jesus from the dead, it implies that there is a greater power in the world than sin and death, and that means there’s still hope for people. It says that even though people have done the very worst they could do to God, He still loves them and wants to win them to Himself. It means that there is nothing a person can do that is so bad that God can’t forgive it – because He’s willing to forgive the worst that people can do even to Him.

7. If Jesus was raised from the dead, it implies that everything He said and did was right, His claims are true, His teachings are the reliable Word of God for how to live, and He alone is right. It means that death is not the end — life is permanent. Whatever suffering one has to go through in life will be worth it when one is raised on the Great Day of victory over evil. Life now can be built around what one will be in resurrection, and not around getting what one wants out of life in this broken world.

God is much better than we could ever hope Him to be. In the midst of our most very worst hopelessness He reveals the answers to our greatest fears and yearnings. Instead of destroying us as completely corrupt, He shows His love in offering us a way out of a trap we otherwise can’t escape. And as He always does, He offers an opportunity to start over again, with His help.

As the Scottish writer George MacDonald said, “It’s not too good to be true. It’s too good to not be true!”

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South Burnaby Church of Christ

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