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What About the Other Jesus(es)?

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While I was doing research for a project at school on YouTube, a video was suggested to me that I had actually seen before. The video, which was created by the media company Vice was called, "Siberian Cult Leader Thinks He's Jesus." Basically, the video  is about how a person from Vice, Rocco Castoro, traveled to Russia and alongside many followers and curious onlookers, he join a pilgrimage on one this group's most holy days to meet a man who claims to be Jesus. The man above's name is Vissarion or The Teacher. Vissarion says that he is the same Jesus of the Bible, and that he is the Word of God. Rocco Castoro also says in the video that there was no doubt in his mind based on what he was experiencing that his followers think he is God. I personally think that he looks like many of the "White Jesus" depictions that we have seen throughout history like the one below. What is important to note for this blog is that whether it be his appearance, his f

The Genuine Light of Jesus

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Recently, many people have been talking about Kanye West, his Jesus is King album and his conversion to Christianity. The stories of his album began a while ago so I will not be discussing the album specifically or his early moments of conversion. I want to speak to something more recent. I also do want to say that in my opinion, Kanye West is a believer. We do not need to wait for fruit, he dropped a massive fruit basket for us all called Jesus is King to attest to his conversion. Also,   based on 1 Cor. 12:3 Paul says that no one can say that "Jesus is Lord" without the Holy Spirit and Kanye says this very statement in one of the songs. I actually want to treat Kanye in this post like any other believer and focus on an image I saw recently that not only shows the genuine heart of Kanye, but I believe points directly to Jesus. Above is a screenshot of a post  that I saw on my Instagram feed posted by the Young America's Foundation. The post has to do with something

Jesus Worthy of Our Praise

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As I was watching videos on YouTube today, I noticed a video done by a YouTuber named Steph Macleod. The video was a band playing a Celtic version of the worship song Jesus Paid It All . It caught my attention and I watched it. Right at the end of the video they had a graphic that you can see below that shows the title of the song. Jesus, being the focus of the song has his name in the title and this got me thinking about our worship songs and how people view Jesus through them. Just like in my last post , here I want to look at what this specific image of a worship song about Jesus is communicating to other people, but I also want to speak to worship songs about Jesus in general. YouTube is a very popular website where many people whether they are Christians our not can view videos of all different messages and themes. This video was suggested to me, I did not search it. I would imagine that because of my previous searches on YouTube that would include searching for other w
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Meme Jesus I know that many people will at some point be doing a post on Jesus being used in memes, but hopefully I can give a perspective and ask some questions that are somewhat unique to the topic. Here I have inserted a meme that is an image of Jesus and in this post I want to focus on memes, how they portray Jesus in general, as well as talk about this meme specifically.  The Merriam-Webster  dictionary defines a meme as, " an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media." In their simplest form, memes can be quite harmless, just something funny that is passed around the internet and grows. For some time now, memes and meme pages have become quite popular in Western Christian culture. For many years Christians have started things within their community to be funny such as funny television shows, comedians, and just jokes. The one thing that I am always wary of howev
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The Offensive Jesus Two posts ago , I wrote about Jesus being King and I briefly mentioned politics in that piece. Canadian politics has had a heavy amount of media coverage because of course elections are almost here. Recently, I was having a conversation with a family member about Canadian politics, and they told me about an interview that they had seen. They thought that I would be interested in it considering it mentioned Jesus. I was intrigued and watched the interview. The video had CBC's Vassy Kapelos speaking to Green Party Leader Elizabeth May in regards to the upcoming election as well as a little bit about herself (see video below). Most of the video is pretty well what one may expect. Elizabeth May shares about her policies especially the Green Party's claim to fame, climate change as well as some fun facts about herself. Where the interview gets interesting is at 12:53 when Vassy Kapelos begins to ask more personal questions to Elizabeth May, specifically, &qu
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The Hidden Beauty of Jesus It is interesting what can catch your eye when you just scroll mindlessly through social media. As I was looking through Instagram today, a post about Jesus really popped out at me. The post was this picture from evangelist Ben Fitzgerald's account that you see below. The post says, "Take a moment.. remember how beautiful he is" (based on the context of the the post, the "he" would be Jesus). I wanted to write my blog post about this image because the more I thought about the phrase on it, the more I realized how interesting of a characteristic the beauty of Jesus is. This characteristic is something that I have often heard Christians sing about in songs like Beautiful One or pray about in church, but why do Christians say that Jesus is beautiful? We have never really seen Jesus so it can not possibly mean beautiful in the physical sense. Normally, the compliment of beautiful in my English language and Canadian culture is r
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King Jesus As I was scrolling through social media I came across a post on Instagram by  Apologetics Central  that really caught my eye in terms of the topic of the images of Jesus. To be honest I do not know the backstory to this post or really much about the account itself but that is not what I am focusing on in this post. Again it was the image that caught my eye. "The point is this: Jesus is king" is what the post says. With the crown to accompany the words, this is a great image to show the royalty of Jesus. However, as I began to think about what this post means  I began to wonder. Do people really see Jesus as King? What does that even mean? Often some of the first images of Jesus that we think about are saviour, good shepherd or for some just a really good teacher etc. The Bible says in 2 Corinthians 4:4 that the devil is the god of this world. However, in Revelations 17:14 Jesus is called the "King of kings and Lord of lords," and that he will o