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“Lord, Liar or Poached Egg?” – Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up.
Who do ‘they’ say that He is now?
If there’s one thing I have learnt from studying cults and world religions, it is that everyone has a ‘Jesus’. He can not and will not be ignored. Their ‘holy’ books – The Qur’an, Book of Mormon, Watchtower, the Vedas – they must acknowledge Him:
The Mormon Jesus is satan’s brother; Jehovah’s Witness Jesus – ‘a’ god; the Muslim ‘Esa’ – Mohammed’s forerunner. The New Age Jesus is anyone you want him to be (Messiah, Krishna, or the fifth Buddha), and the Jesus Seminar ‘scholars’ can’t quite make up their minds exactly who He is, but still feel a need to vote on what He may or may not have said! Even Jewish people may accept Him as a good, moral teacher.
Who do some ‘Christians’ say that He is?
In Israel I was struck by religious art. In the murals of the Greek Orthodox church Jesus is still a babe (and Mary is huge), and in Roman Catholic sculptures He is pretty close to dead on the cross. It wasn’t until the Empty Tomb (well…one of them) that I truly ‘saw’ Jesus.
Gone.
Risen.
Yes. Jesus was born of the Blessed Virgin, but Mary no longer holds Him.
Yes. He was crucified and laid in a tomb (one of them) but the grave couldn’t hold Him, either.
He is risen, and He now holds you and me… and His mum.
Well, regardless of who ‘they’ say that He is now, every tongue will ultimately confess that He is LORD and, to finish my C.S. Lewis quote:
You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
Louise, you got me started on this again, and now I will definitely have something besides the madmen on I-285 to keep me awake this morning driving to work.
At the risk of sounding more ancient than I am, when I was at Ga. Tech they had a couple of classes designed to take the edge off the students’ “geekiness.” One of those was public speaking and I took the class as a senior.
One class, I worked up the nerve to give a short speech based on the C.S. Lewis quote you gave, “Jesus, Madman or Lord,” or some title like that. You know I like to stir things up. I remember the heated arguments (not debate) that ocurred after the speech. One guy in particular got so red in the face I thought he’d explode. We were kids barely out of our teens, but we already had formed our beliefs about Jesus. Of course, Atlanta was more Southern then than now, much more religious, thoroughly Baptist, and Tech was much more conservative then too, if that is possible. So the students gave the grades on the speeches and they counted pretty heavily in the final grade. On that particular speech I gave, the class split almost 50/50. Half gave me an A. Half gave me an D’s and F’s. I think there was one wishy-washy agnostic that gave me a C. No B’s. The episode stuck with me. Regardless. My point is, I wonder how the grades would fall today.
More importantly, I think we know how Jesus would be graded. We have a lot of work to do to present our Living Lord to the world.
Bless you and I’ll plug your mission trip to Israel here too.
1. Unbelievers tend to tell me they don’t know who Jesus is or haven’t thought about it. Complete spiritual apathy.
2. They know I believe He is Lord.
3. The nive people who knock on my door on Saturday don’t even have the truth, but seem to have more convictions than I do, because I am not doing that knocking. The JWs and the Mormons are convicting in their devotion.
4. I like the asking people what they believe. A very honest approach to find out about others’ beliefs. I will try this more often.
Boker tov Louise, ???? ??? ????
Praise God!! We serve a risen Savior. The best evidence of a living Savior to the unbelieving world is undeniable new life of a dead, buried and resurrected sinner. That’s you and me. No pressure.