Rather than a fearful huddle of believers worried about what Herod, the Romans, or those pesky liberal Sadducees might do, the early Christians appeared to actually believe Jesus when he said the gates of hell, nevermind the IRS, would not prevail against his church (Matthew 16:18).

It isn’t enough just to agree with the idea, in the abstract, that Jesus is, in some sense or other, God. (People often say to me, ‘Is Jesus God?’, as though we knew who ‘God’ was ahead of time, and could simply fit Jesus in to that picture.) God, as we have already seen in Revelation, is the creator, who is intimately involved with his world, and

The biography of Jesus continues through us, through the church, even through—perhaps especially through—our adversity.