As Jesus calls His 12 apostles, the scribes and Pharisees claim that His miracles are done by the power of Satan, not the Spirit, thereby slandering the Holy Spirit of God.

I receive a daily devotional from Chuck Swindoll in my Inbox. Recently his devotional entitled, “Greatness,” focused on “we become what we think.” Indeed, Proverbs 23:7 declares, “For as he thinks within himself, so he is.” He writes: “The secret of living a life of excellence is merely a matter of thinking thoughts of excellence. Really, it’s a matter of programming our minds with the kind of information that will set us free . . . Our minds were originally enemy-held territories. We were blinded by the power of the enemy. The mind was his ‘base of operations’ until the light shone within . . . And what is God’s ultimate goal? To take ‘every thought captive’ . . . His plan is to transform the old thoughts that defeat us into new thoughts that encourage us.”

Jesus’ ministry causes conflict and rejection within the Jewish leadership resulting in the plot to kill Him.

The Tulsa race massacre (aka the Black Wall Street Massacre, the Greenwood Massacre) took place 31 May and 1 June 1921, when mobs of white residents, many of them deputized and given weapons by city officials, attacked Black residents and businesses in the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma. It marks one of “the single worst incident(s) of racial violence in American history.”

Jesus’ Galilean ministry causes conflict with the leadership of Israel.

Senior columnist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Ari Shavit, has written that the 20th century was “the most dramatic century in the dramatic history of the Jews. In its first half, we lost a third of our people. But the second half of the century was miraculous. In North America, we created the perfect diaspora, while in the land of Israel we established modern Jewish sovereignty. The Jews of the 21st century have today what their great-grandparents could only dream of: equality, freedom, prosperity, dignity.

Jesus proclaims the kingdom of God and His Messianinc miracles prove that proclamation.

President Joe Biden is the second Roman Catholic president in American history. Biden attends Mass every Sunday and on Catholic holy days, and he regularly prays the rosary (a series of meditative prayers) using rosary beads that belonged to his son Beau. He wears his Catholicism on his sleeve and is not afraid of publically affirming his personal faith. Furthermore, Biden oversees a government with an unprecedented representation of the Catholic Church

To prove his thesis that the gospel is about Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Mark presents the forerunner John the Baptist, Jesus’ baptism and His temptation in a fast-paced narrative.

That the American family is in crisis is a given in this Postmodern, Post-Christian culture. Conservative columnist David Brooks provides a salient summary of the profound change in the American family: “If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We’ve made life better for adults but worse for children. We’ve moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options.