God tried to introduce Himself through Abraham. He tried through Israel. He tried through His prophets. Over and over, He sent messengers, and unfortunately, many of those prophets were killed for their message. By the time we reach the New Testament, the prophets of the Old Testament are referred to as men who were murdered for what they proclaimed. And yet God was not done. There was one more thing He could still do.

"For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but so that the world through Him might be saved" (John 3:16-17).

God finally said: if they are going to really know what I am like, I have to go down there. And so He sent His Son, Jesus. This is where we come to Act Three of the story: the rescue. This is where the hero enters.

The Hero Enters the Story

Jesus, whose name literally means "God saves," was born to Mary more than 2,000 years ago. Though He was born in a very real location at a very real time, He existed with the Father and with the Spirit before any of it began. He stepped down into our space as God in the flesh, and He began introducing us to exactly what God is like.

There is a concept in screenwriting known as "Save the Puppy." It is a literary device where, somewhere in the first few moments of a movie, the hero does something generous, kind, or heroic to create a connection between the audience and the protagonist. It does not have to be literally saving a puppy. It just has to be something that makes you root for them, something that makes you want to see them succeed.

Take the movie Rocky Balboa, for example. At the beginning of that film, Rocky visits his deceased wife's grave and honors her memory. He runs into a single mom going through a tough season and is incredibly kind and generous to her, in a completely platonic way, because he is still in love with his wife. He finds out she has a son and starts spending time with him. One of their activities? They adopt a puppy. By the end of all that, you are thinking Rocky is the best human being on the planet, and you want him to achieve every single one of his goals. Why? Because he does good things.

When God came to earth to show us exactly what He is like, He put the fullness of His goodness and His greatness on display.

The Goodness of God on Display

Jesus spent time with people that others refused to be near. The tax collectors, the publicans, the ones society just called "the sinners." He said He would have dinner with them because they needed to hear the truth too. He spent time healing the sick. He fed the hungry. He put the goodness of God on display in everything He did.

One of the most outrageous things Jesus did in that culture was interact with and touch lepers. Leprosy is not something we hear much about today outside of Scripture; there are no outbreaks in our counties. But in Jesus' day, lepers were required to cry out "Unclean, unclean" to anyone who came near them. That was the law. They had to keep their distance. Leprosy disfigures the body because those who suffer from it lose feeling in their extremities. They injure themselves without even knowing it. Lepers were considered permanently unclean for the rest of their lives, and if one touched you, you were instantly considered unclean yourself. You had to go through a process to become clean again.

So what did Jesus do when a leper started crying out to Him? He reached out and touched him. In that touch, He was saying: you cannot make Me unclean, but I can make you clean. And He healed the man.

Jesus put the goodness of God on display. He put the wisdom of God on display. Over and over, the religious leaders of the day tried to catch Him in a trick of the law, tried to stump Him, and they could not do it. He put the wisdom of God on display in His teaching. The Sermon on the Mount remains the single greatest sermon ever preached by the greatest teacher who ever lived. Why? Because His wisdom is perfect. And He invited people to follow Him.

He Emptied Himself

Philippians 2:5-8 describes it beautifully: "Have this attitude in yourselves, which also is in Christ Jesus, who as He already existed in the form of God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied Himself by taking the form of a bond servant, being born in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, death on the cross."

In a few succinct verses, we see Acts One, Two, and Three all in one place. Jesus put on display the goodness of God, the perfect wisdom of God, and the authority of God over everything. And then He surrendered His life.

The Tree That Restored All Things

The relationship between God and humanity was broken in a garden, at a tree, where the first humans chose not to believe in the goodness of God and rejected His authority. But Jesus, in the act that restored everything, also did it at a tree. His tree looked like a cross.

At that tree, He restored all things. At that tree, He defeated sin. At that tree, He defeated death. The cross makes Him our Savior. He is the One who rescued us from our sin. But the resurrection makes Him our Lord. It is where He defeated death once and for all, and it was finished.

That is why, on a day like today, we need to be reminded: after the cross came the resurrection.

He Is Not Here

Luke 24:1-6 tells us, "But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb, bringing the spices which they had prepared. And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb. But when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. And while they were perplexed about this, behold, two men suddenly stood near them in gleaming clothing. And as the women were terrified and bowed their heads to the ground, the men said to them, 'Why are you seeking the living one among the dead? He is not here, but He has risen.'"

This is where He becomes our Lord. Philippians 2:9-11 continues: "For this reason also, God highly exalted Him and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father."

Joining the Rescue

Here is what is so beautiful. Now that we have been rescued, if you have made that decision to follow Jesus with your whole life, you get to join Him in rescue operations. You get to extend that rescue to other people. We are still living in the rescue, because yes, He has come and He has rescued us, but He has also said there are more people who need to be rescued. Go and do it in the power of the Holy Spirit. Take the message.

In John Ortberg's wonderful book about Jesus called Who Is This Man?, he tells the story of a man named Henri Dunant. Dunant was a Swiss philanthropist who could not stand the sound of soldiers crying out on battlefields after they were wounded. So he devoted his life to helping those injured soldiers, and in the 1860s, his work became the foundation for what we now know as the Red Cross. What was he doing? He was joining Jesus in a rescue operation. He was saying that Jesus cares about the wounded and the injured, and he was going to join Him in that.

Then there was Father Damien, a Belgian priest who had a heart for lepers. He saw what Jesus did and said he wanted to help lepers too. So he relocated to Hawaii, where he had heard about a leprosy outbreak, and he established a community for the lepers there in the 19th century. Every single week, he would stand in front of them, look them in the eye, and simply say, "God loves you, lepers." Week after week, year after year: "God loves you, lepers."

Then one day, after decades of serving them, Father Damien stood up in front of his small congregation and said, "God loves us lepers." He had contracted the disease himself. But with great contentment he suffered, because he knew he had fulfilled the mission God had given him: to be a rescuer of lepers.

The Fingerprint of the Rescue

When the early church first began building structures, a group of priests and bishops came together for what was known as the Nicene Council, one of the first councils where many things were being decided. As buildings were being constructed, they made a decree: every time a church was to be built, there was to be a building next to it that they called a hospice, a place to care for the sick and the dying, because they saw that Jesus had a heart for that. This is really the beginning of what became known as hospitals.

You can see the fingerprint of Jesus and His rescue all over the planet and all over our culture, because people partnered with Him in rescuing. The rescue is not finished. It continues through every person who says yes to following Jesus and carries His mission forward into a world that still desperately needs it.