THE PERSON AND TEACHINGS OF JESUS

INTRODUCTION

Evidence for Jesus' Claim to Deity

INTRODUCTION

Just who then is this Jesus? To paraphrase C. S. Lewis, Jesus is either a lunatic who thinks he is a poached egg, a liar so evil He must be a demon from hell, or else the person He claims to be, the divine Son of God. Not God the Father but God the Son Whatever else He is, if Jesus is a mere man, He is NOT a great moral, ethical teacher. That is a claim the NT does NOT allow us to make of Jesus. We either accept Him as God or else relegate Him to the status of demon or lunatic.

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE RESURRECTION

Is there any support for our claim that Jesus is God the Son? Many well-meaning Christians will claim: "He is the Son of God because the Bible says so." Whereas that is true, that is not the direction we want to take in this study. Why? Because when we take this approach, we have made no more compelling arguments than the Muslims who claim that their Bible, the Koran, says that Jesus is NOT God. When we say that the Bible says something is true, we are simply pitting our Bible against theirs, an action which will not win anybody over.

Whereas the Bible does claim that Jesus is God, it does not PROVE that Jesus is the Son of God simply because it says so. Rather the Bible presents evidence to support its claim that Jesus is the Son of God. That evidence is the resurrection. The resurrection of Jesus is the basis for the NT's claim that Jesus is truly God.

What makes the resurrection so important that it proves that Jesus is truly divine? The resurrection is so important because it is the kind of event that only God could perform. Now doctors today are good at resuscitating people, and if Jesus were just merely resuscitated, then He might be nothing more than a mere mortal. HOWEVER, resuscitation and resurrection are NOT the same thing. The resuscitated person lives only to die again later; the resurrected person will never die again. Resuscitation means the person comes back to the same life he experienced before he died, whereas resurrection means the person enters into a whole new level of existence. In resuscitation the person lives in his regular original body; in resurrection the person's body is radically transformed. In resurrection it may be the same body; however, it has been so radically transformed that for all practical purposes the body is brand new!

Well, Christianity claims that God the Father resurrected Jesus from the dead. If this is true, then Jesus is truly God the Son. Why? Because the Father would have never raised Jesus from the dead if He were a blasphemer, claiming to be God the Son when in fact He was not. God would have never resurrected Jesus from the dead if He were a lunatic claiming to be God when in fact He was not. The only reason God would have resurrected Jesus who claimed to be God the Son is that Jesus was in fact who He claimed to be, God the Son. Everything in Christianity hinges on the resurrection. If the resurrection is true, then Jesus is truly God the Son and Christianity is true; if the resurrection did not occur, then Jesus was either a demon from hell or a lunatic.

EVIDENCE FOR THE RESURRECTION

Eyewitnesses

The first piece of evidence the NT presents for the resurrection is the testimony of people who claimed to have been eyewitnesses of the resurrected Jesus. In 1 Cor. 15 Paul presents the official list of those people who claimed to have seen the risen Lord: Peter, the other 10 disciples, 500 Christians who saw Him at the same time, James the half-brother of Jesus, all the other apostles, and finally Paul himself. Over 500 people claimed to have encountered the resurrected Jesus. Paul claims that even though a few of them had died by the time he wrote 1 Cor. 15, most of them were still alive. In fact he told the Corinthians that they could go interview these 500 for themselves if they did not believe him.

Now what is significant about this group is that many if not most of them suffered persecution because they claimed that Jesus had risen from the dead. People will die for a truth but not for a lie, especially if they know it is a lie--at least not all 500 of them. The fact that most of them suffered persecution and did not change their testimony is compelling evidence that what they claimed to have happened actually did happen. There is absolutely no evidence from either Christian or Jewish sources that any of these 500 broke ranks and claimed that they made up the story of the resurrection.

Some may claim though that many of those who claimed they saw the resurrected Jesus in fact were just hallucinating. Whereas some might have hallucinated, 500 people at one time would not have been hallucinating. They could have experienced mass hysteria, just not mass hallucination.

One particularly noteworthy fact is that in Paul's list of witnesses, he does not mention a single woman. This is strange in light of the fact that the gospels themselves claim that the first eyewitnesses of the resurrection were in fact women. The reason Paul does not list them is that he is presenting the official list, that is, the list which could have held up in a Roman court of law. Since women were considered unreliable witnesses, he fails to mention the names of the females who actually saw Jesus first. The gospel on the other hand were not presenting the "official" list; they were writing history. They had to make a choice. They could either falsify the account of the resurrection by claiming that the first eyewitnesses were men, or they could tell the truth and risk rejection by admitting that the first eyewitnesses were women. They chose to tell the truth even at the risk of having their accounts outright rejected. The fact that they said the women were the first eyewitnesses of the resurrection is compelling evidence that the women did see a resurrected Jesus.

The fact that they were Jews also supports their claims because the last thing a Jew would ever claim would be that God would become a Man and die and rise again...unless it really happened.

If the resurrection did not occur, then why did the early Christians claim they saw the resurrected Jesus? Any other explanation is going to be harder to believe than the one the NT presents.

The Empty Tomb

The next piece of evidence that the resurrection really occurred is the empty tomb. The empty tomb doesn't prove that the resurrection occurred; however, if the resurrection did occur, then this piece of evidence is critical. If the body of Jesus were still in the tomb, then He did not rise from the dead in the way the early Christians claim He did. If the body was still in the tomb, then He just experienced soul-transference, not resurrection. In this case His soul like everybody else's went to heaven; His body was unaffected.

The fact is that there is no body; the tomb is empty. Some claim that the women went to the wrong tomb. That mistake would have quickly been remedied by either the disciples or the Jewish religious leaders who had so much to gain if they could only produce the body. It was in the vital interests of the Jewish religious leaders that they produce the body. Yet they do not.

If the resurrection did not occur, then why is the tomb empty? The alternative explanation is harder to swallow than the one the NT presents.

The Response of the Jewish Religious Leaders

A closer look at the response of the Jewish religious leaders to the resurrection harmonizes with the disciples' claim that Jesus had risen from the dead. Instead of producing the body--which they can't, the Jewish religious leaders don't even search for the body. Instead they persecute the early Christians, an act of desperation on the part of those who can't win by means of evidence or logical argument.

The Existence of the Church

How does the existence of the church function as evidence for Jesus' resurrection? First, the fact that the church is even still around is evidence that Jesus rose from the dead and still lives to keep His church in existence. As Dr. Edwards showed from Acts 5, whenever a man claimed to be the Messiah sent from God, his movement died the moment that man died. (In Acts 5 Gamaliel lists several examples of just this very thing.)

"But," you might say, "other movements continued to exist AFTER their founder died." Yes, but there is a radical difference. Christianity is not simply based upon Jesus. It is based upon the belief that Jesus died and rose again. The fact that Christianity survived His death shows us that His disciples continued to believe they had met the Jesus who had died and risen from the dead.

Second, the early Christians claim that the resurrection is what started the church. Now the church is not just the local bodies of believers; it is that great force which has marched across the ages functioning as the greatest civilizing influence in the world. If the resurrection of Jesus did not create the church, then what did? If you claim that Jesus did NOT die and rise from the dead, then you have to come up with an explanation about what created the church and keeps it going. Any other explanation is going to be far more absurd than the explanation of the resurrection.

Changed Lives

Finally, the radically changed lives of millions across the ages attest to the reality of the resurrection. Drug addicts, prostitutes, murderers, thieves--every class of society has seen many of its members touched by the hand of Jesus, transforming them into children of God.

The greatest example of this is Paul. Few, if any people, hated Jesus more than Paul did. Paul realized that Jesus threatened his beliefs; since he couldn't argue against the truths of Christianity, he tried to destroy it by destroying Christians. Acts 8:3 says that Saul (Paul) "ravaged" the church. (The word "ravaged" has behind it the idea of a wild beast ravenously devouring its prey. Paul was ravenously devouring the church.) Paul not only searched for Christians high and low in order to imprison them, he also cast his vote against Christians at the time of judgment for them to be put to death. Yet instantaneously, as in the blink of an eye, he was radically changed from being a hater of Jesus to being Jesus' greatest proponent. His radical change not only surprised the early Christians, it so stumped his former allies the Jews that they sought to put him to death after he started preaching in Jesus' name (Acts 9). Acts 9 claims that what changed Paul was Paul's encounter with the resurrected Jesus on the road to Damascus.

The question we have to ask is this: if a living, resurrected Jesus did not radically change Paul, then what did? If the resurrected Jesus did not change Paul, then why was he persecuting followers of Jesus one week and the next week proclaiming Jesus to be the Son of God? Any other explanation is harder to swallow than the explanation that the resurrected Jesus changed his life.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOU AND ME

Jesus Wants to Be Radically Involved in My Life

Whatever else it means for Jesus to be both God and Man, it means that God wants to be radically involved in my life. In the 1700's a type of theology called "Deism" dominated western civilization. Many of America's founding fathers, Washington, Jefferson, and Adams, were not Christians; instead they were deists (actually evidence suggests that Washington actually was a Christian and not a Deist as secular historians are wanting us to believe). They believed that whereas God created the universe, He left it to itself basically to determine its own fate. C. S. Lewis though has stated that it would have been illogical for God to have created the world and not visit it. The coming of God into the world blows deism to smithereens. God has NOT left us to ourselves. The incarnation, God becoming a man, means nothing less than God IS intensely concerned about us and is willing to go to the utmost extreme to be involved in our lives.

It is marvelous that Jesus does not want to get into our lives in order to be a meddlesome busybody. Rather He has seen the pitiful state we are in and has come into our world to deliver us from this pitiful state. The story of Jesus is the story of the Strong Man who comes down to save us who are perishing.

At first blush it seems comforting to know that God is so interested in us that He was willing to become a man to live among us. We shall see though that God is much more interested in us than what we bargained for. He loves us far more than we bargained for. We like God to be with us--but at a safe distance so that we can keep on doing the things we want to do. The incarnation though says that God has removed that safe distance. He is here among us and is here to stay.

Jesus Has Ultimate Claim Over Our Lives

Since Jesus is God, then His Words are authoritative in an ultimate sense. We may like the teachings of other men; however, Jesus' teachings are the standard by which we measure the teachings of all other people. If their teachings disagree with the teachings of Christ, then we reject those teachings. If they harmonize with Christ's teachings, then we accept those teachings.

One teaching of Jesus is especially important for us, His teaching that He has ultimate claim to our lives. This claim is so final that our response to Him determines where He will send us to live in eternity, in heaven or in hell. No other NT writers speaks about heaven and hell to the same extent that the loving Jesus does. He claims that He will decide where we spend eternity on the basis of our response to Him. If we respond to Him negatively, then we will spend eternity in fiery hell; if we respond positively to Him, we shall enjoy eternal life in His presence. Only God can make such a claim legitimately; since Jesus is God, we need to take this claim deadly seriously.

Jesus is Worthy of Our Worship

Finally, since Jesus is God the Son, He is worthy of our praise. As part of the Godhead, He is worthy of as much praise as the Father and the Spirit. There is a unique element though to our praise of Jesus. Of the Three only Jesus left the splendor of heaven to dwell among men. Of the Three only He suffered the humiliation and excruciating pain of the cross. Of the Three only He descended into hell so that we might live in heaven forever. Without minimizing our praise of the Father, we need to make sure that our primary focus of worship and praise at this time is on Jesus. Not only does Jesus deserve this unique praise, the Father Himself demands it.

Jesus has Made Us Sons and Daughters of God

At the moment we accepted Jesus as Savior and Lord of our lives, He came to dwell within us. This is such an important event because only those people who have Jesus living within them are actually saved: "and if anyone does NOT have the Spirit of Christ, he does NOT belong to Him" (Rom. 8:9).

How does this affect us? According to Paul because the Spirit of God's Son has come to live within us, we are now sons and daughters of God: (Rom. 8:12). Whereas Jesus is eternally God's Son, at one point in time we were not God's sons and daughters; however, from the point that the Spirit of God's Son came to live within us, we became as much God's children as Jesus.

I can honestly say that it has been a great privilege to have been the son of such parents as C. A. and Louise Ford. But I can also say that as great a privilege as that has been, it is an even greater privilege to be a son of God. As good as they were, He surpasses them as day surpasses night. As C. S. Lewis states, "The Son of God became a son of man so that we might become sons of God." Jesus' Sonship GUARANTEES that sonship.