A man is born in an obscure middle eastern village, a child of a peasant woman. He grew up in another tiny backwater village of no reputation. He worked as a carpenter until he was thirty, then for three years he was an itinerant preacher, going from town to town with an inspired message.
He never owned a mansion or lived in a castle. He never wrote a book. He never married, or had a family. He never went to college. He never placed a foot inside a big city. He never travelled even 200 miles from the place where he was born. He never held an office. He never raised an army. He wasn’t good looking, or rich, or famous. All of the credentials that usually accompany greatness were missing from his life.
While still a young man, the tide of popular opinion turned against him. His friends ran away from him. One of those closest to him denied even knowing him. Another betrayed him.
Turned over to his enemies he is shamed and abused, and subjected to the mockery of an unjust trial.
He was then nailed upon a cross between two thieves. While He was dying His executioners gambled for his coat. When dead, he is finally laid in a borrowed grave by the kindness of a friend. Those are the facts of his human life.
Amazingly, the story does not stop there. Three days after his gruesome demise he was raised from the dead. Twenty long centuries have come and gone, and today this same man is a centerpiece of the human race, and the trail he has left though the centuries is incomparable.
All the armies that ever marched, all the parliaments that ever sat and all the kings that ever reigned, put together, have not affected the life of man upon this earth as powerfully as has this one solitary life.
