Who Is Jesus? Part 1Sample

Would You Die for a Lie?

In this chapter, God proclaims loud and clear that Jesus is His beloved Son. Literally, a loud voice from heaven declares this truth about Jesus at His baptism! And we find references to Jesus’ divinity throughout His ministry. His parents were told to call Him Immanuel, which means, “God with us.” When Jesus asked the disciples who they thought He was, Peter responded with: You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God. Jesus also made this clear about Himself. He said He existed before Abraham, that He had seen the Father, and that He had the ability to forgive sins. All things that only God could do!

So what do we do with that information? Are we to believe John when he says that our God put on human flesh and moved into the neighborhood? 

Based on the claims Jesus made, we have three options here: we can believe that Jesus is a liar, that He’s a lunatic, or that He’s Lord. C.S. Lewis addresses this choice saying: 

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about [Jesus]: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. 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.”

The one thing Jesus cannot be is simply a great human teacher. He claimed to be God. So either He was lying, He was completely insane, or He was telling the truth. So was Jesus a liar? Well, there aren’t many people who would go through what Jesus went through for a lie. He was beaten beyond recognition and then died the most gruesome death, drowning in His own blood. And all He’d have to do to make it stop would be to admit it was a farce—unless it wasn’t. No, Jesus was not a liar. 

So was He crazy? Was He living under a delusion? Well, people will follow a lunatic for a little while—it’s amusing. But no one would die for the sake of entertainment. And the earliest followers of Jesus all suffered immensely for their loyalty to Him and His message. Even after being beaten and thrown in prison, they would not back down in preaching Christ—His death and resurrection. No, Jesus was no lunatic. 

There’s one option remaining: Jesus was telling the truth. He is our Lord … Immanuel, God with us. So what is our response? Will we respond as Peter did to the question of who Jesus is?

Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the living God.