Two weeks ago, we discussed the question, is
there a God?
And you remember, we agreed with Einstein and
Darwin that the existence of a person who
was also intelligent and was the supreme being
behind the universe was the most plausible explanation
and indeed the only completely satisfactory explanation for
the existence of us persons and the existence
of our world and the order and design
of the universe itself and the existence of
conscience and moral sense of obligation in people
who find morals themselves most unnatural.
And then last Sunday, we dealt with the
most striking empirical evidence of a creator behind
the universe that our world possesses.
And it's the empirical evidence presented in the
last quarter of this book here, the Bible.
It's the historical record of an incredible man
who said he was the only unique son
of our creator, that he was of the
same substance as the supernatural creator of the
world.
And we looked at the historical record of
this man because he claimed to be God
here on earth.
So the big issue that we dealt with
last Sunday was, is this book and particularly
the historical record of his life, is it
really reliable?
Is it history or is it myth?
You remember, we saw how the men who
wrote about him were actually eyewitnesses of his
life and not only were they eyewitnesses, but
there were other people who did not come
to the same conclusion as they did about
him who nevertheless said exactly the same things.
We found there were contemporary historians like Tacitus
and Pliny, Celsus, Porphyry, men who did not
believe in Christianity at all, but yet in
their histories, they have recounted the same effects
and the same details of this man's life
of Jesus of Nazareth.
We discovered too that there were other people
who were alive while these men were circulating
their accounts.
There were other contemporaries of theirs who could
easily contradict these events that they talked about
if they were in fact wrong.
And you remember then we studied the transmission
of these original accounts down through the centuries.
We said that if you compared it with
the ancient history upon which we utterly depend
for knowledge of Caesar or knowledge of Homer
or knowledge of Plato, there is absolutely no
comparison because this book has manuscript documentary evidence
that makes all other history seem unreliable where
we accept the poetry of Homer on the
basis of two manuscripts, the oldest of which
is 900 years after, in fact, it's 2000
years after Homer wrote his poetry, where we
accept Caesar's Gallic Wars, which consists of nine
manuscripts, the oldest of which is 900 years
after Caesar wrote his history, where we accept
Plato's Republic, which is based on only two
manuscripts, the oldest one of which is 1300
years after Plato wrote the Republic.
We have behind this incredible history 4,000
manuscripts and thousands more of scraps, two whole
manuscripts in the British Museum that are dated
about 300 or 350 AD and one particular
scrap that is dated as early by carbon
14 method as 125, 130 AD.
And so if you question the authenticity or
the historicity of this record, you have to
reject all of history because this is so
far ahead of all history as far as
proving its authenticity is concerned.
So loved ones, last day we came to
the conclusion that this man Jesus said the
things that he's reported to have said and
did the things that he's reported to have
done.
Or if he didn't, we can't trust any
history in our world at all because this
history is so reliably reinforced and substantiated.
So the real issue is looking at this
man's life, is he the son of our
creator?
Was he divine?
You see the issue, not is he a
son of God?
There are plenty of people like Jehovah's Witnesses
who will say we're all sons of God
and Jesus is a son of God, but
was this Jesus the unique son of God
who knew the creator before the world was
created?
Is Jesus the son of our maker?
It's important to ask the question because you'll
agree that we don't say this about Zoroaster
or Confucius or Muhammad or Buddha or Moses
or Isaiah.
We say they're ordinary men and prophets who
tell us about God, but they are not
God the creator come to earth.
And so what we're saying is, is this
Jesus the creator, our creator come to earth?
Because if he is, that's the clearest demonstration
that not only we have a creator, but
that he is a certain kind of person
that we possess.
Why do we say that Jesus is the
son of our creator?
Well, the first reason is, and don't dismiss
it until you've heard me out on it.
The first reason is he talks like the
son of our creator would talk.
Now don't dismiss it because I'll deal with
the old cynical observations that certainly I would
make upon that comment.
But he talks like the son of our
creator would talk.
He does.
He was a little guy of 12 in
the temple, son of a carpenter.
They lost him, his parents, you remember, came
back to find him and they asked him
what he was doing and he said, did
you not know I'd be about my father's
business?
Well, his father's business was carpentry.
But he was in the temple discussing theology
with the doctors of theology there.
He talked like the son of our creator.
He talked with the authority of the son
of our creator.
That's what they said.
They said, he teaches with authority, not like
the scribes.
He teaches as if he knows these things.
He made this the crucial question in his
whole career.
He did.
He made this the central issue.
He said, whom do men say that I
am?
He didn't go round about it.
He said, whom do men say that I
am?
And Peter said, you're the son of the
blessed.
And he said, blessed are you.
That flesh and blood has not revealed this
to you but my father who is in
heaven.
In fact, his contemporaries opposed him because he
said he was the son of God.
That's why they tried to kill him.
They said, he treats God as his own
father and he makes himself equal with God.
And that is so, loved ones.
Jesus never avoided the whole claim that he
was the unique son of our creator.
And he talked that way.
And you know, that's why they executed him.
Did you realize that?
They didn't execute him because of his teachings.
They were prepared to accept his teachings but
they executed him because he was God's son.
And the amazing thing is that at the
very point when he could have saved himself
by denying that, he didn't.
And maybe you'd look at it.
It's John, Mark chapter 14, loved ones.
Mark 14 and verse 61.
And you remember it's during the trial before
the high priest.
Mark 14 and verse 61.
But he was silent and made no answer.
Again, the high priest asked him, are you
the Christ, the son of the blessed?
And Jesus said, I am.
And you will see the son of man
seated at the right hand of power and
coming with the clouds of heaven.
And the high priest tore his garments and
said, why do we still need witnesses?
You have heard his blasphemy.
What is your decision?
And they all condemned him as deserving death.
And some began to spit on him and
to cover his face and to strike him,
saying to him, prophesy.
And the guards received him with blows.
So actually at the very moment when he
could have escaped the whole thing by denying
it, he said, yes, I am the son
of the creator of this world.
And he identified himself with God.
You know, he said, I can forgive sins.
He said, is it easier for me to
say to this man, rise and be healed,
or to say your sins are forgiven you?
So he took upon himself actions and responsibility
that only the creator of the universe could
have.
He said, if you've seen me, you've seen
the father.
He said, if you receive me, you receive
him that sent me.
So he talked in those terms, loved ones.
Now, so do lots of people in the
psych wards, right?
The psych wards are full of such people
who think they're Napoleon or think they're God
or think they're God's son or think they're
the savior of the universe.
The world itself is filled with people like
Moon, the Korean, you know, who claim to
be in some way supernatural.
It's full of gurus who are trying to
draw attention to themselves as if they were
somebody different.
And that's why I'd ask you to examine
this man's life and claims in the light
of the other possibilities besides the fact that
he may be the son of God.
Just examine them, and you know them.
We've talked about them before.
First of all, he was a liar.
That's the first possibility, that he knew he
was not God's son.
But in order to lend authority to his
teaching, he pretended he was God's son.
But could I point out to you, you
know, what one skeptic in Britain, a man
called J.
Stuart Mill, who was a well-known economist
and philosopher who rejected Christianity utterly.
Could I read you what he said?
Above all, the most valuable part of the
effect on the character which Christianity has produced
by holding up in a divine person a
standard of excellence and a model for imitation
is available even to the absolute unbeliever and
can never more be lost to humanity.
For it is Christ rather than God whom
Christianity has held up to believers as the
pattern of perfection for humanity.
Men like John Stuart Mill believed there is
one supreme moral teacher in the universe, and
that is Jesus of Nazareth.
In other words, wherever you go among philosophers,
they'll all agree with this.
He is the supreme ethical teacher that our
world has ever seen.
His teachings are more sublime than any others,
and his life is more in conformity with
his teaching.
Now, how could that be?
How can we say that if this man,
on the most crucial point of his teaching,
is a liar?
How can you?
How can you say that this man, whom
the whole world regards as the foremost ethical
teacher in our era, how can we say
that this man, who taught better than anybody
else, who lived closer to what he taught
than anybody else, on the central issue of
his own identity, lied to us?
Loved ones, do you see it makes foolishness
of our whole system of logic?
It makes foolishness of us ourselves.
If this man was a liar, he can't
have been the great ethical teacher that everybody
talks about.
He either lied or he was a great
ethical teacher.
Some people say, well, he was a lunatic.
He was misguided.
He simply thought he was God's son when
he really wasn't.
But do you see the problem about that?
His life has none of the abnormality or
imbalance that a lunatic's life has.
Indeed, most of us, except maybe some extreme
skeptics, look to Jesus' life as the balanced
life.
We look to his attitude to people in
love and kindness and patience under pressure as
the ideal life that a human being should
live.
It isn't the life of a lunatic.
You remember what C.S. Lewis said that
no one has yet explained how such deep
moral teaching could come from the mind of
a megalomaniac.
And I think that's the difficulty you're up
against when you try to label Jesus a
lunatic.
None of the rest of his life expresses
the imbalance or the chaos of a lunatic.
It expresses the very opposite.
It expresses sanity and the kind of integrated
personality that all of us would like to
experience.
Maybe he was a legend.
That is, maybe he wasn't all that his
followers said he was.
Maybe he was an ordinary man who had
some good qualities and then they added other
bits on in order to make themselves the
leader of some great religion.
Do you see that a legend requires time
to develop?
Do you see that?
Do you see that if Greg, with his
new suit, if he is to die in
two, three years' time and then we wait
five years and somebody writes a book presenting
him as the greatest Greek teacher that the
world has ever known, then there are many
of us here who would say, no, he
was good, but he wasn't that good.
And until we all died off, nobody could
pass that kind of story onto the world.
It requires time for a legend to develop.
It requires time for all of the contemporaries
to die who knew the man.
Do you see that that time didn't exist?
It existed with Buddha.
Buddha lived in 500 BC and the first
time his writings were committed to paper or
his sayings were committed to paper was in
980 BC.
980 AD, about thousands of years later.
But with Jesus, the letter to the Galatians
was circulating in 48 AD.
That was just 19 years after Jesus died.
There were many men, young men and women,
20, 25, 30, who were alive when Jesus
was crucified, who were still alive when the
New Testament accounts were circulating and they could
simply say, no, it didn't happen like that.
Sure, he died, but he never rose from
the dead.
We were in Jerusalem at that time.
There was not time for a legend to
develop because the historical accounts of Jesus' life
were circulating before all his contemporaries had died
and they were known throughout the then known
world.
In other words, loved ones, if Jesus was
not a liar and was not a lunatic
and was not a legend, then you're left
only with one possible conclusion.
That he was what he said he was.
Now, the reason we say that is that
he didn't only talk like the Son of
God, but he lived like the Son of
God.
Muhammad's life is full of stories of vengeance.
I don't know if you know that, but
if you study his life, full of acts
of vengeance of all kinds.
Confucius' life is full of admitted faults.
Jesus' life was sinless.
Now, you know, don't say, oh, he said
that.
No, he didn't.
He didn't.
Though he would, strangely enough, say to people,
who of you condemns me of a fault
or convicts me of any sin?
He would say that to people.
Now, I mean, none of us would do
that, but he actually said to people, who
of you convicts me of sin?
So he would do that.
But we say he was sinless because the
people who knew him said he was sinless.
The people who lived with him and ate
with him, they said he was spotless.
Even his enemies, the centurions, said, surely this
man was the son of God.
Even Pilate, who was trying him, said, listen,
I find no fault in this man.
And it is interesting, isn't it, that all
of us, however close to God we may
be, are conscious of something wrong in our
lives, aren't we?
In fact, it's interesting, Paul said, that the
more you get close to God, the more
you realize you're a sinner.
And so all saints have admitted some sin
in them that they were more conscious of
than ever before.
Jesus doesn't have that.
Isn't that interesting?
And yet, you know that the world has
not seen him as a conceited fool.
Isn't that strange?
They have not seen him as a conceited
blind fool.
They've seen him as one of the most
perceptive, one of the humblest men that have
ever lived.
And yet, he was not conscious and he
never admitted to any consciousness of sin in
his life.
And his friends confirmed that by their own
observations.
And his humanity, you know, was the kind
of humanity that we would expect God to
live here on earth.
It really was.
There's a man called Schaaf, a church historian,
and he has talked about it this way.
He said, when you look at the perfect
humanity of Jesus, you see the kind of
humanity that we would think the creator of
the world himself would produce.
His zeal never degenerated into passion, nor his
constancy into obstinacy, nor his benevolence into weakness,
nor his tenderness into sentimentality.
His unworldliness was free from indifference and unsociability
or undue familiarity.
His self-denial from moroseness.
His temperance from austerity.
He combined childlike innocency with manly strength, absorbing
devotion to God with untiring interest in the
welfare of men.
Tender love to the sinner with uncompromising severity
against sin, combining dignity with winning humility, fearless
courage with wise caution, unyielding firmness with sweet
gentleness.
It is true, isn't it?
When you think of Jesus, you think of
perfect humanity.
Then, loved ones, it's not only that he
talked like the son of our creator and
lived like him, but he did the kind
of things that we would believe our creator
could do.
He calmed storms.
He just said to a lake, be still,
and the storm went down.
He met a man who had congenital blindness
and he healed the blindness.
He met a widow whose loved one had
died and he raised the loved one.
He met Lazarus's sisters who were crying because
Lazarus had died and he raised Lazarus up
from the dead.
Jesus did the kinds of miracles that we
would expect the son of our creator to
do.
And of course, the foremost fact that it
is impossible to get rid of, it really
is.
All kinds of gurus have been able to
control their breathing.
All kinds of escape artists have pretended that
they were buried alive and then have rose
from the dead.
Nobody has been in any doubt, but that
they did not rise from the dead.
They were not dead at all.
It was a trick of some kind.
But no man has throughout his life explained
to his friends and followers that he was
going to be killed and was going to
die and was going to be dead for
three days and then was going to rise
from the dead and has done it.
No man has done that.
Of course.
No man or woman has left our earth
and said they would come back when they
wanted to and actually come back and persuaded
everybody that they were alive and then have
disappeared off the earth forever.
No one has ever done that.
But do you realize that the resurrection of
Jesus is an incident that is better substantiated
and better reinforced with evidence than any other
incident in our history?
Really?
I mean, I'm talking about history beyond 100,
200 years.
There is no incident in our history that
is more variously and more substantially narrated and
reported than the resurrection of Jesus.
And no event has been subjected to so
much questioning, legal questioning, historical questioning, theological
questioning, geological questioning.
No event has so often been questioned and
criticized and examined carefully and has come out
so absolutely untouched by it as the resurrection
of Jesus.
You know the old arguments and I will
not draw them out, but there isn't one
that stands.
If Jesus only swooned, then how, how, bleeding
from the wound in His side and from
the wounds in His hands, could He have
come back into consciousness so strongly that He
could appear on 13 different occasions at 13
different places, sometimes within an hour of each
other, even though they were miles and miles
apart?
How could He have done that if He
had only swooned?
He could never have done it.
If the disciples stole His body, why then
did they die for a lie?
If the Romans stole the body, why didn't
they parade it through Jerusalem and say this
man was a fraud?
Even if you examine those twin facts of
the resurrection appearances and the empty tomb, there
is just no way in which you can
reject their historicity and their authenticity.
You tackle the resurrection appearances with the whole
theory of hallucinations and it falls apart.
The whole theory of hallucinations falls apart.
A hallucination demands that people experience it personally
themselves.
It's a subjective experience.
He appeared to about 500 people at one
time.
A hallucination has to be experienced by a
people who want to experience it, who are
hoping it will happen.
These people said, listen, we've given up.
We thought that He would have been the
one to redeem Israel, but He is dead
now and gone.
They hid themselves in the upper room.
They were so convinced that He was finished
with.
None of the laws of hallucinations fit the
appearances of Jesus.
Loved ones, you're bound by the history in
this book and by almost every critical theory
you can produce for its interpretation, you're bound
to admit finally that this Jesus must have
been the Son of our Creator.
He must have been the Son of the
One who made your face and your hands.
That's the only conclusion you can come to
if you allow your mind to work logically
and to examine the evidence in detail.
Well, you see, you have to do what
you want to then.
Is Jesus the Son of your Maker?
Is He?
If He is, you have some things to
do.
You know, you need to realize that if
He is, then He is here now today
and He's alive at this moment and He
knows you and He can hear you.
I wouldn't dream of stepping in on this
sacred ground.
You have to decide what to do then.
It's not for me to give you little
theories.
If you really believe He is the Son
of your Creator, then it's your business what
you do.
But I think you agree that you do
have to do something.
If He can hear you now, you need
to make some approach to Him.
Lord Jesus, we may not even be treating
you as our Lord, so we call you
Jesus and say that it looks as if
you're bound by logic to conclude that you
are the person you say you are.
You're the Son of our Maker, our Creator,
our God.
Jesus, we would ask you to kindly show
us something more of yourself in our own
lives somehow and teach us what we should
do next in our communication with you.
But Jesus, if you are the Son of
our Maker, then we want to know what
you and your Father want us to do.
We ask you to begin to show us
that from this day forward.
We ask it because of yourself and because
we believe you're real.
Amen.