THE AUTHORITY OF JESUS AND HIS WORD
Jesus spoke much about the 'Kingdom of God'. He taught those who were with Him that in the future times He would come and take over the world. He also said that they could enter now into the experience of the power of the kingdom. The gospel writers wrote that there was something of a mystery about Jesus Himself. While they were in His presence, of one who had all authority and power. He was one that when He spoke there was such truth and honour that to obey Him was natural. They would often recall the Old Testament prophets that when God spoke directly to them whether it be of rebuke, or encouragement they obeyed, such was their experience, and now these writers were the same. These men knew that sin could not stand in His presence, and they experienced the same abhorrence of sin, the assurance of forgiveness, and the irresistible desire to worship Him, and give their whole lives to Him. When Peter, James and John on the mountain saw Jesus transfigured (Luke 9:28- 36) they experienced a visible manifestation of the Son of God as vivid as any that came to Moses or Isaiah or Ezekiel. All these were seen in the man Jesus. Many times in the Old Testament many had made pilgrimages to the temple at Jerusalem and sometimes God had granted a kind of experience to them and God at His own will and purpose had even spoken. But the New Testament writers had received these experiences at first hand actually in His presence. On the mountain they concluded that what they had seen and heard was not a temporary interruption in His life, it belonged permanently and essentially to Him as a person. He was also a man, the son of Mary, a Galilean, a teacher, but He moved at ease between two worlds and belonged to both. It was while in fellowship with Him that they seemed to find a partial entrance into the kingdom of God. It was A E Taylor speaking on the experience of the early church after Pentecost, suggests that what held the early disciples around Jesus was not His moral perfection, nor His wonderful teaching, but first and foremost "the direct and immediate impression He made by His whole personality of the presence in Him of something 'numinous not to be understood in terms of categories of ordinary human life, and secondly the confirmation of this impression by the transcendent events of the resurrection and Pentecost". We could collect many testimonies from the later history of the church of how the sense of the 'numinous' about Jesus continued to be experienced in very much the same way as it was by the Apostles.