The Shocking Truth About You, Me and Barabbas
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The Shocking Truth about You, Me and Barabbas This amazing hidden truth in the Easter story will turn your life upside down! Berni Dymet Life Applicaton Booklet THE SHOCKING TRUTH ABOUT YOU, ME AND BARABBAS by Berni Dymet LIFE APPLICATION BOOKLET Published by Christianityworks © Berni Dymet 1st edition - Published 2019 Except where otherwise indicated in the text, the scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Cover design: Mariah Reilly Design, Sydney Australia We gratefully acknowledge the creative contribution of Mariah Reilly in the cover design of this book. Printed by: Creative Visions Print & Design, Warrawong, NSW, Australia No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means - electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise - without prior written permission . Christianityworks Australia: PO Box 1729 BONDI JUNCTION NSW 1355 p: 1300 722 415 India: PO Box 1602 SECUNDERABAD - 500 003 Andhra Pradesh p: 91-9866239170 e: [email protected] w: christianityworks.com e: [email protected] CONTENTS CHAPTER 1 Let’s Tarry for a While 5 CHAPTER 2 An Innocent Man 17 CHAPTER 3 Who is Barabbas? 31 THIS BOOKLET IS OUR FREE GIFT TO YOU Thank you for your generous support in making it freely available to others CHAPTER 1 Let’s Tarry for a While It’s interesting how quickly Easter passes us by, how quickly we forget it and move on. Sure, it was a long weekend and it was great to have some time off and have a rest and have a bit of chocolate. Easter comes, we eat chocolate, we have that long weekend, it goes and that’s it. We move on. It’s back to work or school or an empty house or whatever it is that you do day after day after. Tat’s why, in this booklet, I’d like you to join me, to dwell and tarry, just stay in this Easter thing for a little while longer. Because it’s a big thing, this Easter thing. Not just as a religious holiday, I don’t mean that. I, for one, am definitely not into religion, it just doesn’t work for me. So I’m not talking about religion. I’m talking about this big thing that God was and is up 5 to at Easter. Te thing that Jesus went through, the suffering, the persecution, the beating, the rejection and that death on the cross. Whether you’ve come to realise it or not, you are so incredibly special to God – which is what makes you worth dying for. He handcrafted you, He made you, He set you free in this amazing universe always loving you, but with the freedom, he gave you a free will to accept Him or reject Him. As the Psalmist writes, pouring his heart out to God: For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed. How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! I try to count them—they are more than the sand; I come to the end—I am still with you. (Psalm 138:13-18) And yet, in our own free will, we turned out backs on God: For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God … (Romans 3:22,23) It comes right down to this: He made us, He loves us, He gave us a free will and the point of all that was for us to have the opportunity know 6 Him freely, to love Him willingly and to have this fantastic relationship with Him, here and now and for all eternity. But it doesn’t matter which way we cut it, each one of us in our own way, has rejected him. I know I have, more often than I can even imagine or count or recall. And in doing that, we miss the whole point of creation, the whole point of life, the plan and the desire of God’s heart for you and me. When we turned our backs on God, and we all have, we missed the whole point of life. Indeed, that’s exactly what the Greek word used for sin in the New Testament means. It means literally, “to miss the mark” or as we might say it these days, to miss the point. I know that when I use the word “sin” people often write in or call in and they say, “Come on, this is some kind of old fuddy-duddy concept, get with it Berni. Get into today, sin just isn’t relevant, it’s something that priests and ministers talked about in the 1950’s, come on - get with it, it’s old fashioned.” And I know that some people think of sin in that way but let’s come back to Easter and the central point, the central problem of all creation is that we rejected God, we turned our backs on Him. Now that’s hard to come to grips with. People say, “Well, I’m not that bad, I’m okay.” But let me ask you, from the moment you were old enough to do so, did you put God first? Was God always first in your life? Did you live your life as though you belonged to Him? And the answer for all of us is no, we didn’t! We’ve all done things wrong, we’ve all turned away in our way, in different ways, we’ve all 7 turned our backs on God and at that cross at a time that we now call Easter and we celebrate and remember, on that cross God calls us home. Te consequences, the price that we should have paid for rejecting Him, were paid for by his own Son, Jesus. He died to give us a new life. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:22) Out of his great love, God reached out to us through Jesus, through Him who knew no sin, laid our sin upon His shoulders, in order to open the door to a real and dynamic and exciting and beautiful and wondrous relationship with God. A new life: So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! (2 Corinthians 5:17) At the heart of the message of Easter is the fact that Jesus paid the price of my sin, of your sin, of our rejection of God, of our missing the whole point of creation. But the fact that Jesus paid the price seems so unfair, don’t you think? Let’s have a read. “What is truth?” Pontius Pilate asked, with this he went out again to the Jews and said, “I find no basis for a charge against this Jesus but it’s your custom for me to release to you, one prisoner at the time of the Passover. Do you want me to release the King of the Jews?” And they shouted, “No, not him, give us Barabbas.” Now Barabbas had taken part in a rebellion. 8 Ten Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged, the soldiers twisted together a crown of thorns and put it on his head, they clothed him in a purple robe and went up to him again and again and again saying, “Hail the King of the Jews.” And they struck him in the face. Once more Pilate came out and said to the Jews, “Look, I am bringing him out to you to let you know that I find no basis for a charge against him.” And when Jesus came out wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe, Pilate said to them, “Here is the man.” As soon as the Chief Priests and their officials saw him they shouted, “Crucify, crucify.” But Pilate answered, “You take him and crucify him, as for me, I find no basis for a charge against him.” But the Jews insisted, “We have a law and according to that law he must die because he claimed to be the Son of God.” And when Pilate heard this he was even more afraid and he went back inside the palace. “Where do you come from?” He asked Jesus but Jesus gave him no answer. “Do you refuse to speak to me?” Pilate said, “Don’t you realise I have power either to free you or to crucify you?” and Jesus answered, “You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above therefore the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin.” From then on Pilate tried to have Jesus set free but the Jews kept shouting, “If you let this man go you are no friend of Caesar.