St Mary's Church, Dymock

Welcome to Modulo – The Essentials which explores the same topics as Modulo – The Basics but in six parts to give a bit more detail. It reveals who God is, how he made himself known to humanity, how we get to know him, how he gave us Laws to respect him and each other, how things go wrong when we fail to keep those Laws, and what God did about it.

• 1/1: Who Is God - what's He Like?
• 1/2: Freed To Serve
• 1/3: God Keeps His Promise
• 2/1: God's Solution To our Sin
• 2/2: Ministry Nears Its Climax
• 2/3: Resurrection And Proof

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Evidence is offered in several ways to reveal who God is, what he's like and how we know, then goes on to explore how he made himself known to humanity via a childless couple who, if they obeyed God, would have descendants that would become a great nation.
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• The evidence presented includes: creation & evolution, past people’s experience, and how to build our own relationship with God today.
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How God revealed himself to humanity is explored, how he gave us Laws to live by, made a Covenant (an agreement) with the early people to protect them if they would obey his Laws, and how they and we today still find that too difficult, so keep breaking those Laws.

• Failure to keep God's Laws causes a 'separation' between him and us, much like a naughty child is separated from their loving parent.
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God gave those early people a way of showing they were sorry for disobeying him – by sacrificing a valuable animal and spilling its life-giving blood to show you were sorry; and he specified how to arrange a Temple to worship him, with a 'veil' (a curtain) to separate himself from disobedient people.

As a result of their disobedience, they wondered in the wilderness for 40 years, before God kept his promise to Abraham and gave them a land of their own.
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• God always keeps his promises, but his time scale is different from ours (he's outside of time, as he created it).
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• There wasn't a person good enough to make amends for our sin, so what was God to do about it? (See Module 2)
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Several prophets in the Bible's Old Testament described the coming of a saviour. This Module reveals some of their principal predictions, together with details of Jesus' birth and early childhood that fulfilled those prophecies.

The way Jesus' prepared for his work as an adult is then described, along with some of his early teaching.

• Jesus came to make reconciliation between God and humanity for our sin, but before he did that, he taught us the right way to interpret God's Laws, and to satisfy all the old predictions about himself.
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As his ministry was reaching its end, we learn that Jesus' teaching widened to included God, heaven, humanity, and life after death; and that he gradually made his way towards Jerusalem, which he entered to the cheers of the crowd.
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As he shared his Last Supper with his disciples, Jesus took a cup of wine, gave thanks to God and said, "This cup that is poured out for you is the New Covenant in my blood" (Luke 22:20). He was betrayed to the religious leaders who felt threaten by him (they claimed his teaching was blasphemy - ie: false teaching about God) and subjected him to a trial using false evidence. Stirred up by the religious leaders, the crowd now turned against him; so he was convicted as a common criminal, tortured, and executed by the painful death of being nailed to a cross for hours (crucified).

• Failure to keep God's Laws causes a 'separation' between him and us, much like a naughty child is separated from their loving parent.
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• Jesus' ministry drew to an end at the time of Passover - when God freed the slaves (see Module 1/2); but now God was freeing all people from the 'slavery' of sin. The New Covenant is that God will forgive those who sin if they believe in him and at least try to follow Jesus, and keep God's Laws.
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• As Jesus died, the curtain in the Temple was split in two, symbolically showing that humanity is no longer separated from God.
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After he died, Jesus was buried in a tomb that was guarded by Roman soldiers; but three days later, as he'd predicted, he was found alive again.

The Bible describes accounts by many eye-witness of his being alive, and that after a period of 40 days, he returned to heaven (known as the 'Ascension').
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• As Jesus' had no sin, by allowing himself to be crucified he made a perfect sacrifice - so unlike the old sacrifices, it only had to be made once, and regular animal sacrifices are no longer needed..
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