Is Christianity the only true religion?
Ravi Zacharias Ministries has been actively engaged in the question of religious truth for many decades. Listen to this cogent answer from one of Christianity’s foremost defenders.
Who was Jesus, Really?
Jesus is clearly one of the most awe-inspiring men who ever lived. More has been written about him than any other person on the planet, past or present. But many people today question whether he was really God’s son. Most vary between believing that he was some sort of really special spiritual person, an avatar as the Hindu’s like to put it, or just a good teacher. The facts surrounding his life are evident. Jesus inspired a world changing movement in the form of early Christianity and he claimed radical things about himself in the gospels. To get to the heart of who Jesus was, we must research two aspects about this man who lived 2,000 years ago. The questions that must be addressed are:
1) Who did Jesus think he was? (Traditionally called the self-understanding of Jesus.)
2) Did Jesus really rise again from the dead?
Both of these questions have tremendous importance. If Jesus didn’t believe that he was uniquely God’s son, then the Christian message about him is wrong. Additionally, if Jesus didn’t rise again from the dead, there is no hope for Christians of life after death. In this article we proceed to answer the first question. A 
future article will address the subject of Jesus rising again from the dead
Who did Jesus think he was?
In this day and age it is very popular to believe that during the silent years of Jesus, the period of his life between the ages of twelve and thirty, in which nothing is written about him, he traveled to Asia. The theory is that Jesus settled in India and learned the secrets of eastern thought before returning to his homeland in Palestine. Unfortunately, this theory has absolutely no basis in fact. The first record that can be found supporting this view comes from a man named Nicholas Notovitch who published a book in 1894 called The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ. During his day, there was a movement to try and synthesize the teachings of Buddhism and Christianity, and his work helped to spur that movement on. Notovitch claims that his book was written while he was traveling in Tibet. Through various circumstances, one of the chief Lamas at a Himi Monastery informed him of a secret manuscript about Jesus’ life and travels in the east. The Lama then had it read aloud through a translator. There are numerous problems with Notovitch’s story, but one of the biggest is the manuscript he claims to have gotten his story from has never been found. There are also numerous inconsistencies within his own book that led credible scholars of his day to renounce his book. Nevertheless, his theory has been recapitulated through the years by other authors who use his work as a reference or to claim similar stories about Jesus. It’s interesting that most people are willing to believe the work of one man from 1894 rather than over 25,000 ancient New Testament manuscripts that point to Jesus being the unique son of God. The sad part is that if you were to ask most people on the street which idea is more ancient, the biblical account of Jesus, or the one proposed by Notovitch, some would pick the one by Notovitch. This idea about Jesus has circulated through the mass media in waves over the last hundred years and the result is that a significant portion of our society believes that there may be some truth in it.
As an aside, just notice how each year the major news magazines, Time, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report, all do a major cover story on some “new” aspect of Jesus’ life. They all claim that “modern research is re-thinking the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth.” The next year they move on to some newer theory of Jesus’ life that contradicts last year’s theory. It is all done to sell magazines. This is not an entirely bad thing. It shows that even in modern society, people love to read about Jesus. However, it’s very important that our information about Jesus be based in credible research and not just a desire to sell magazines or new ideas.
The Jesus Seminar
Since the idea that Jesus traveled to India cannot be considered as a credible option, we must return to the gospel accounts. There has been a movement of liberal scholars in the past twenty years called “The Jesus Seminar” that seeks to re-evaluate the gospels and re-determine what Jesus really said. The Jesus Seminar places the apocryphal gospel of Thomas as a more reliable historical source than the traditional gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Right from the start, the Jesus Seminar desires to downplay the four eyewitness gospel testimonies of Jesus in favor of another document. Time does not permit a detailed account of the gospel of Thomas, but needless to say, it was written much later than the four gospels and by a person who was not an eyewitness. The Jesus Seminar teaches that Jesus never stated that he was God. In fact the results of the Jesus Seminar research reported that Jesus only really said about 20% of what the traditional gospel’s claim that he said. The rest is Christian tradition and myth. There are numerous problems with their research and their conclusions, but on an ironic note, evangelical scholar William Lane Craig took the 20% from the gospels the Jesus Seminar said was authentic and he still proved conclusively that Jesus believed that He was God. If you ever get a chance, please look up William Lane Craig’s stuff online. He is a master debater and thinker for the cause of Christianity.
The Evidence from the Bible
Good research regarding the reliability of the New Testament-(NT), discounts much of what the Jesus Seminar has to say, as well as those who believe that Jesus traveled to India. However, we will now study the evidence from the NT itself to see what Jesus believed about himself and what the earliest Christians believed about Jesus.
If we investigate the NT we find numerous examples of who Jesus thought he was. On three separate occasions the Jewish leaders sought to stone Jesus explicitly because he claimed to be God: John 5:16-18, John 8:54-58, John 10:29-33. Even back then, killing someone was a serious offense. In fact, the Romans only allowed Jewish leaders to administer capital punishment in one case, that of blasphemy. For the Jewish leaders to be so upset with Jesus as to try and kill him proves that he was saying things that led them to believe he was claiming to be God. In various other places, Jesus exhibits the qualities of God, such as omnipotence, an eternal nature and other qualities of God.
Omnipotence – All Powerful
John 6:40 – Jesus could raise the dead.
John 10:17-18 – Jesus had the power to lay down his own life and take it up again.
Colossians 1:15-20 – Jesus created all things in the universe.
An Eternal Nature – Existing Forever
John 1:1-2 – The Word always existed.
Hebrews 13:8 – Jesus Christ the same, yesterday, today forever.
Other scriptures that claim that Jesus is God are:
Titus 2:13-14 – the glorious appearing of our great God and savior Jesus Christ.
Acts 20:28 – the church of God, which he bought with his own blood.
II Peter 1:1 – Through the righteousness of our God and savior Jesus Christ.
John 20:28 – My Lord and My God.
Matthew 14:32-33 – they worshipped him.
Colossians 2:9 – Jesus is the express image of the invisible God.
John 14:7-9 – anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.
The Son of Man
Some claim that Jesus did not believe that he was God because he was constantly referring to himself as “the Son of man.” And in fact, they are right in one sense. Jesus did refer to himself more as the Son of man than anything else. In our culture, if someone were to call themselves the son of man, we would take that as a reference to their humanity. Jesus however, meant something else entirely by his use of the term. Our first clue for this is in Daniel 7:13-14 where a divine being that looked like “a son of man” approaches God’s throne and is given dominion, power and an everlasting kingdom and all the peoples of the earth worship him. In Mark 14:60-65, the account Jesus gives of himself to the Sanhedrin is very similar to the one in Daniel. It’s almost a direct quote from Daniel. This was not lost on the Sanhedrin at all. Based upon Jesus’ words in verse 62, they condemn him to death with the charge of blasphemy.
The Messiah Complex
Another clue is found throughout the gospels, in that Jesus would not publicly be recognized as the Messiah of Israel. John 6:14-15 gives us one of the reasons. The Jews believed that the coming Messiah would be the one to overthrow the Romans and begin Israel’s domination of the earth by a military kingdom. Historically, it is proven that this was their primary interpretation of the ministry of the Messiah at the time Jesus showed up. If Jesus claimed to be the messiah openly, he would have subjected himself to all their wrong ideas about what the messiah would do. In fact, whenever Jesus did tell one of his followers that he was the Messiah, he also tells them not to say anything about it until after he had risen from the dead, Matthew 16:20. What Jesus did instead, is to give himself a divine title without all the excess baggage. Designating himself “The Son of Man” allowed him to still be true to who he was without all the wrong perceptions of the title of Messiah. For he was indeed the figure of Daniel 7, and also the Messiah, but he could not openly recognize himself as the Messiah or it would have been detrimental to his ministry. So, rather than be a claim against Jesus, the title Son of Man turns out to be a claim for Jesus actually being the Son of God.
Many people have claimed that they have finally figured out Jesus and what he stood for during his ministry on earth. Everything from Time and Newsweek during the holidays of Christmas and Easter to more liberal academic works abound on the subject. Yet for all the volume of work that has been produced about Jesus, the clearest and most significant documents are still the four gospels. In these gospels, Jesus clearly shares the message that He is God’s unique son, and that any person who believes in Him may enter into a relationship with God. John 3:16 clearly spells out the purpose of Jesus coming to the earth when it says, “God loved the world so much that He gave his only son, that whoever believes in him will not perish but will have eternal life.”
The relevance of God
Oxford professor John Lennox discusses the relevance of God during a forum at Duke University.
Questions about Christianity -If God planned for Jesus to die for us, why did the Ten Commandments and sacrifice come first?
God used the Ten Commandments to show us our sin. It was necessary to help us understand how bad we really are. Otherwise, we wouldn’t understand our need for a savior in any way. The Ten Commandments constantly point us towards the fact that we do not live consistently under God’s law. We always want to do things our own way. Paul tells us in Romans 7:7-8 that it was only because of the law that he understood how sinful he really was. The law is just one of God’s ways to help us realize our need for a Savior. It shows us that we cannot save ourselves because we cannot properly follow God’s directions.
God gave the Israelites the system of sacrifice in order to point to something greater that was coming, the sacrifice of his own dear son. In the ancient world, anything important in the way of a promise or covenant involved the shedding of blood and the killing of an animal. God used this in order to point to the shedding of blood that would be required for the forgiveness of our sins in Christ. Jesus came and died on a cross in order to show us how greatly God loves us. All the sacrifices that came before Jesus were pointing us to the great sacrifice that Jesus would perform for us. In theological terms, this is called a “foreshadowing”, something that points toward something else in the future. The sacrificial system was pointing toward the coming of Jesus and the once and for all sacrifice that God was giving us in Jesus. This is why, in John 1:29, John the Baptist can look at Jesus and say, “Look, the lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world!” John realized that Jesus was going to be a sacrifice for the sins of humanity.
Questions about Christianity – Does God know who will accept him and who won’t?
The short answer is yes. God knows. God possesses all knowledge about every event and possibility, past, present and future. There is nothing that he does not know and nothing that he could not know. All knowledge is his. However, the question usually lurking behind today’s question is “if God knows who will accept him and who won’t, then why does it matter what I do since God already knows?” Implicit in this is a sort of determinism that leaks into our thoughts because it seems like everything is already determined.
Without going into a lot of philosophy and theology about God and predestination, let me just say this: Just because God knows does not make you less accountable for what you do. The Biblical worldview is one in which God knows everything AND one in which the Bible calls us to make decisions that honor God, beginning with submitting to Christ as Lord and Savior. the Bible has not given us the information as to how to put together the fact that God knows what will happen and our responsibility to respond to the Gospel message. But what God has given us is the knowledge that we are to respond to it. That should be enough for us. Standing on the sideline and questioning God about it isn’t going to get you anywhere. The better response is to submit to Jesus as Lord and Savior and allow God to lead and guide your life, since, he knows…right? 
Questions about Christianity – Why hasn’t God revealed himself more clearly if he wants us to know him?
Why doesn’t God show himself more clearly to us if he is really up there? This question has been asked by countless people, rich and poor, educated and uneducated, past and present. Implicit in the question is the recognition that if God is there, and by definition is the most powerful being ever, he should really want us to know about him. Additionally, many people feel that if God is truly loving, then he should make it easier on us. And that is really the crux of the matter. We want it to be easier.
The Bible tells us that God is known by all people naturally. Romans 1:19-20 says that all people naturally know there is a God simply by looking at the natural world. It displays a complexity that could only have come about by the power of a master designer:
19 They know the truth about God because he has made it obvious to them. 20 For ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see his invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse for not knowing God.”
Romans chapter one goes on to describe how all people choose not to worship God as the great invisible designer. We instead choose to worship other things. All of us possess a sin nature which naturally turns us away from God. We put the onus of relationship on him rather than ourselves. We believe that God should do more for us instead of us turning and acknowledging him. This is why people want God to do more in revealing himself to us. But what if God has already done that and more? What if God has already given us everything that was valuable to him by sending his own son to earth as a human. What if God has really given us his love in sending us Jesus? Wouldn’t that make God both right and loving in giving us all the evidence we need?
Some people will conclude that God would need to do more, like appear in front of them magically. But these same people live their lives with so much less evidence regarding everything else they do. They don’t demand that much proof for anything else they believe. This is sometimes referred to as the issue of justified beliefs. How much evidence does it take to make a justified belief? Christians believe that belief in a supreme being, as a belief that has been natural to all people over time for all of history, is still justified by us today. Others request more evidence or say that science has now canceled out the need to believe in a supreme being.
Christians have pointed to the fact that God must be known by faith. Not faith that seeks no evidence, but faith grounded on believable evidence and then stepping beyond that evidence into a relationship with the one toward which the evidence points. Hebrews 11:6 says “And it is impossible to please God without faith. Anyone who wants to come to him must believe that God exists and that he rewards those who sincerely seek him.”
So, in answer to the question of why God doesn’t make it easier to believe in him, I would say two things:
1) Perhaps it is already easy enough, if we will think about what is really going on in our hearts.
2) Perhaps God has already made himself known decisively in the person of Jesus, the greatest religious figure ever to walk the earth.
Think about it. Asking God for more evidence may be like waiting to receive a gift that is already sitting in your lap. All you have to do is open it.
Questions about Christianity – Who decided which books would be in the Bible?
This blog is adapted from the appendix in my book, Read the Word. You can purchase the entire book here.
When I was young, my friends and I made our ultimate all-star teams from our baseball card collections. We’d spend hours laboring over which players to include on our teams. When we were finished, we’d compare and contrast each team, endlessly picking over the finer points of each player’s batting averages and home runs. We were only eleven years old, but it was serious business to us. Of course, the selections we made involved some interpretive decisions on our part. There was always room to criticize each other’s decisions because we all came from a biased viewpoint. I don’t think any of us ever completely agreed on anything.
When it comes to the Bible, how did the church, with so many leaders, ever agree on the sixty-six books that would make up what we consider the Old and New Testaments? In this blog, I wanted to give you the background on how the books of the Bible came together in the first place.
Ultimately, the books in the Bible are there because God directly inspired them. He directed and guided their writing to such a degree that the men who wrote them were writing from their own perspectives but writing timeless and divine truth. How that happened is still somewhat of a mystery. We do know that the Holy Spirit led the authors of Scripture as they wrote (1 Pet. 1:21).
However, from a human perspective, how did the Bible get put together, and who decided it should be the books we have today? Can you be sure that the books you have in your Bible today are really the ones that are supposed to be there? To answer that question, we must go back to the beginning of Christianity ― actually, to the one who began it.
Christianity began with Jesus, and Jesus was a Jew. Jesus believed in the Scriptures of the Jewish nation, which we now call the Old Testament. Jesus taught from the Old Testament and considered it the supreme guide for life. He said in Matthew 5:17-18, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.”
In his day and age, the Jewish Bible was known as “The Law and the Prophets.” When Jesus said that he came to fulfill the Law and the Prophets, he didn’t question their origin. He knew they were from God. Whenever Jesus talked about the Old Testament, it was with the utmost reverence. Therefore, because of Jesus’ high view of the Old Testament Scriptures, the apostles continued to use the Old Testament when teaching about Jesus. To them, it was a given that the Old Testament was God’s Word.
In the first years of the church, all the Christians were Jews. They already believed and revered the Old Testament as Scripture. They believed that the Old Testament Scriptures spoke about Jesus, and they spent their time convincing other Jews of this. The book of Acts contains many examples of Paul going into Jewish synagogues and preaching Jesus as the Christ, using the Old Testament Scriptures. Acts 17:1-3 provides one such example.
“Paul and Silas…came to Thessalonica, where there was a Jewish synagogue. As was Paul’s custom, he went to the synagogue service, and for three Sabbaths in a row he used the Scriptures to reason with the people. He explained the prophecies and proved that the Messiah must suffer and rise from the dead. He said, “This Jesus I’m telling you about is the Messiah.”
I could cite many other Scriptures as well, but I think you get the point. The early Christian church used the same “Bible” as the Jews. We now call it the Old Testament. The real question is, “how did they come up with the belief that certain books should be placed alongside the Old Testament Scriptures to form a new portion of the Bible?” In studying church history, it seems that the early church had one main test that a book had to meet before they considered it worthy of being Scripture. Was the book written by an apostle or a close friend of the apostles? Along with this one test, they had some rational criteria for whether it should be included or not. These can be stated as:
The Test – “Was it written by an Apostle or close associate of an Apostle?”
An ancient manuscript copy of the New Testament
Additionally, it seems that they worked through a couple of other questions in determining if a book was truly scriptural. First, they thought, “Is it accepted by the whole church?” They also asked, “Is it consistent with the Old Testament and other New Testament Scripture?” and lastly, “Does it have the “feel” of Scripture?”
Let’s briefly examine these four questions and why the early church asked them.
Was It Written by an Apostle or a Close Associate?
It was important to the early church to keep a record of the teachings of the apostles, and it was vital that the church have a direct link to Jesus. If a book was being considered for Scripture, it had to have been written by an apostle or someone in their circle of friendship and influence. The apostles Peter, John, Matthew, and Paul account for twenty-one of the twenty-seven New Testament books. James and Jude, the brothers of Jesus, account for two books. Luke and Mark, friends of the apostles, account for three, and the book of Hebrews, whose authorship is debated, rounds out the list of books. Even in Hebrews, there is evidence that the author, whoever he was, was close to the original followers of Christ, for he wrote, “I want you to know that our brother Timothy has been released from jail. If he comes here soon, I will bring him with me to see you” (Heb. 13:23). This verse shows that the author of Hebrews was a friend of Timothy, who was a close friend of Paul. All the authors of the New Testament pass the test of either being an apostle or being well within the sphere of the apostle’s friendship.
For instance, church history records that the Gospel of Mark was written by John Mark as he followed and wrote down the sermons of the apostle Peter. Peter called Mark “my son” in 1 Peter 5:13, so we know that Peter and Mark had a close relationship. Although an apostle didn’t write Mark, someone close to an apostle did.
Another example is the book of Acts, which was written by Luke. He was not an apostle but was a traveling companion of the apostle Paul. In the later chapters of Acts, the travel log of Paul and his companions switches from a “they” voice to a “we” voice, as in “we traveled to such and such a place.” Luke was with Paul on some of his journeys, which provides evidence that Paul approved of Luke’s writings. In addition to this, Paul mentions Luke as one of his companions in chapter 4 of Colossians. While Christians wrote many commendable documents in the years after the church started, the only ones that made it into Scripture were those written by apostles or close associates of the apostles.
Is It Accepted by the Church? The reason I underlined the word “Church” is because I’m not referring to one church or a group of churches in an area, but to the leaders of the entire church in the Mediterranean world. The leaders of the church did get together and talk. They also wrote letters to one another. It was a foregone conclusion that a book was Scripture only if the entire church recognized the book’s importance. Certain books had an appeal to a group of churches in a certain area, but only the books that everybody knew about made it into Scripture. It’s not just that a certain book was more popular or appeared on a first-century version of the New York Times best-seller list. Rather, it needed to be both well-known and highly valued by the church. Remember, there were only twelve original apostles. When Paul or John wrote a letter to a church, it was so important that church did everything it could to get that letter reproduced and into the hands of the other churches. In Colossians 4:15-16, Paul wrote, “After this letter has been read to you, see that it is also read in the church of the Laodiceans and that you in turn read the letter from Laodicea.”
From the earliest times, Christians have been voracious copiers of Scripture. This may not seem amazing in our day of Christian bookstores and twenty different Bible translations, but it was extremely important before the invention of the printing press and in a culture in which Christians were persecuted. I once read that the English word “traitor” comes from a word meaning “hander over,” referring to Christians who handed over copies of the Scriptures to the Roman authorities who arrested them for their faith. The early Christians were intensely committed to the Scriptures. Also, the church was not divided into Catholic, Protestant, and various other denominations until hundreds of years after the apostles died. Therefore, the unity of the bishops or pastors of the churches was more important than it might seem today. The early church consisted of people from places as diverse as Rome, Italy, and Alexandria, North Africa. A book was confirmed as Scripture only when it had a majority of support from a wide spectrum of the church. When they all agreed about something, it was significant.
Is It Consistent with the Old Testament and Other New Testament Scripture? The document in question had to line up with the other Scriptures already accepted by the church. If a book or letter contradicted the teaching of Jesus or the record of the Old Testament, it was not considered Scripture. When you read the book of Romans, you see that Paul had a firm grasp of the Old Testament law and its relationship to our hearts. Paul accurately described the role and purpose of the Old Testament law as seen through the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. Acts 7 records a long sermon from the deacon Stephen, in which he accurately recounts Israel’s history and comes to the same conclusions as Jesus did in Matthew 23:29-36. Stephen’s speech is consistent with both the Old Testament and with Jesus’ words about the current leaders of Israel. Hebrews 11 lists what many consider to be the “hall of faith” of Old Testament heroes. It accurately describes the lives of Abraham, Moses, and many others. All the books called Scripture by the early church had an accurate view of the Old Testament Scriptures and the teaching of Jesus. This point is important because the early church leaders faced constant opposition from the Jewish leaders. They needed to prove that Jesus and the church he started correctly interpreted the Old Testament Scriptures about the Messiah.
Does It Have the “Feel” of Scripture? Early Christians spent hours committing the Scriptures to memory. They could tell the difference between profound writing and something that was not. You do essentially the same thing when you distinguish great fiction from dime-store fiction. Early Christians were better at it because the leaders of the church read Scripture all the time and they regularly read, out loud, entire portions of the Bible to their congregations. A lot of people back then couldn’t read, and they didn’t have their own Bibles at home anyway. If they wanted to remember something about Scripture, they had to memorize it. The early church leaders spent their lives, their time, their energy, and their intellects devouring Scripture. Even most pastors today don’t have the memory for Scripture that those men had. The early church leaders didn’t have five hundred other books on ministry in their personal libraries. Before the printing press made the printed word widely available, everything had to be copied by hand. Parchments were expensive and time-consuming to produce, so the only books church leaders had were usually Scripture or writings from the previous bishop of their church.
Consequently, when they read a fake letter or even good Christian teaching, they could usually tell right away that it wasn’t the same as the Holy Bible, inspired by God. A good example is the letter to the Corinthians from Clement of Rome (not the books of 1 and 2 Corinthians written by Paul). Clement was an early church leader, but his letter to the Corinthian church did not pass the tests, or criteria, of being divinely inspired scripture. Historians believe the author was the same Clement mentioned by Paul in Philippians 4:3, and his letter was read in some early churches; but it never gained the status of Scripture precisely because it isn’t Scripture. It was not divinely inspired, and it didn’t pass the four tests. Therefore, even though it’s good reading, it isn’t contained in the collection of inspired literature, our Bible. The bishops who read it over and over came to the conclusion that it didn’t have the feel of Scripture, and they were right.
In conclusion, it is better to say that the early church discovered which books should be counted as Scripture rather than that they decided upon Scripture. There was never a group of people who came together and said, “Let’s make these books our sacred writings.” Instead, they came together and agreed that the stamp of God’s hand was obvious on certain books.
It did take more time for a few New Testament books to be agreed upon than others. Serious debate took place on only five of the twenty-seven New Testament books that we now have in our Bible. In the end, the church agreed that those five books were also divinely inspired. There were other books that were written by early Christians that did not make it in as scriptural. Two of those are I Clement and the Shepherd of Hermas. If you wonder whether they should be scripture, my encouragement is that you should read them. You will see very quickly that although they contain some good material, they are nowhere near the books of the New Testament in spiritual value.
I hope this has helped you understand why the books in the Bible today are the ones God intended us to have. You can be certain that what you are reading is, in fact, the inspired Word of God. It was tested by the early church and found true. The writings of the Old and New Testament are what God intended the church to have.
Questions about Christianity – How can Jesus be God? He was neither omnipotent or omnipresent.
The question of the identity of Jesus has long been discussed. Ever since he appeared on a Galilean hillside healing the
sick and speaking unparalleled words of significance, people of every race and culture have wondered about him. Jesus is without par in the world for his ability to reach the heart’s deepest feelings with the simplest statements and for his ethic of non-resistance to his enemies which was matched only by his own ability to live by this ethic even when it led to his own death. It is easy to see why Jesus is the most talked about person ever to live on planet earth.
But there is something more to Jesus. He claimed some incredible things about himself. There were times when he spoke as if he had a certain divine privilege to circumstances and knowledge. His own followers, the disciples, clearly taught that he even believed himself to be God. This is what divides people about Jesus. It has long been acknowledged that Jesus was a remarkable figure, but God? People are divided on this topic. To the point of today’s question, the attributes of God are usually listed as being someone who knows everything and someone who has the power to do anything. Jesus did not exhibit either of these traits. Wouldn’t this immediately disqualify Jesus from being God?
The New Testament authors seemed to think about this question and write about it a good deal. The Christian belief is that Jesus is God, but that he came to earth in order to offer himself as the sacrifice for our sins. In order to be the sacrifice, he had to be a human. But to be human, and experience life as one of us, he would need to somehow “limit” himself. Without going into a long theological controversy about how Jesus took on the limits of humanity, I will quote Philippians 2:5-11 which succinctly lays out what Jesus voluntarily did for humanity by coming to earth:
5 You must have the same attitude that Christ Jesus had.
6 Though he was God,
he did not think of equality with God
as something to cling to.
7 Instead, he gave up his divine privileges;
he took the humble position of a slave
and was born as a human being.
When he appeared in human form,
8 he humbled himself in obedience to God
and died a criminal’s death on a cross.
9 Therefore, God elevated him to the place of highest honor
and gave him the name above all other names,
10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
This is just one of the passages in the New Testament that addresses the mystery of what happened when Jesus came to earth. He was the Son of God in power, but he came as the Son of God in humility and lowliness, bowing so low as to become one of us. And it is true that in that form, there were certain things that Jesus did not know at that time. While he was on earth, he didn’t know the exact day or hour of when he would return to earth a second time.
And yet, at the same time, he displayed knowledge that could have come from nothing else but a connection with, or attachment to, God the Father. He knew the thoughts of others. He knew exactly how he would be put to death. He knew things about the past of other people that he had never met. He was more than just a prophet with a lot of knowledge, he had access to the very mind of God himself and no mere human can claim that. In addition to this, he performed unparalleled miracles and even rose from the dead.
C.S. Lewis put the question of Jesus in such a way as to make it simple. Jesus was either who he said he was, or he was a liar, or a crazy man. His ethical teaching realistically rules out him being a liar, and he gave us such intelligent, insightful teachings about our lives that it is impossible for him to have been crazy, so that leaves only one option: Jesus was who he said he was. He was the eternal Son of God.
Read the Gospels accounts of Jesus and read for yourself what people around him thought. Jesus was the most remarkable person that has ever lived on planet earth. He deserves a closer look.
Questions about Christianity – Hasn’t Christianity killed more people in the name of religion than any other faith?
This question has various names and facets, but basically, it comes up as “Christianity teaches love and peace, so why is it responsible for more deaths than anything else in this world?” This is a penetrating question in terms of why a teaching would be ignored by people who supposedly embrace it, but before I answer it, I need to clear away some of the misinformation.
First, Christianity is not responsible for more deaths than any other religion or movement in world history. If you take the communist dictators of the 20th century, they account for over 26 million deaths alone. In fact, nobody knows for sure what the exact toll is for Russia alone, whose communist leadership slaughtered untold millions in the last century, all in the name of a movement that purported to be for the good of the people. For more information on this subject, just read Jonathan Glover’s “Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century”
Next, many incidents in the past have grown larger than their actual importance or statistics because of an ability to use them as examples against Christianity. Two of the most popular are the Crusades and the Salem Witch Trials. Both of these circumstances are used to condemn Christianity and all organized religion. In reality, these events are indeed stained with instances of religious violence, but also with the reality of nation, race and historical circumstance. What I mean is that we look back on those events with a certain perspective that has been created for us by those that are against Christianity itself and the facts of the matter are much deeper than simple propaganda.
Regarding the crusades, I would encourage you to look to the writings of Dr. Christopher Tyerman, a professor at Oxford, especially his book, ”Fighting for Christendom.” Tyerman brings together some of the complex circumstances that were involved in the events of the crusades. Whatever your perspective, his writings will challenge the notion that the crusades were simple religion masking as imperialism.
The same can be said of the Salem Witch Trials. In all, a sum total of 25 people were executed as a result of the trials. This is a tragedy, but not on the scale of how the trials have been portrayed as evidence of the faults of religion. Some people think that thousands of people were executed as a result of what they have been told or read in history books. Additionally, though the trials themselves occurred in 1692-1693, as early as 1705-1710 entire churches and communities were apologizing for their role in the trials themselves. So, if it was Christianity that produced the trials, it was also Christianity that produced the repentance and sorrow to the families of the victims of these trials. Along with this, it must also be noted that the modern hospital system, university system, the model of the non-profit organization and other humanitarian organizations that exist today were overwhelmingly created by people who were explicitly Christian in their beliefs and actions. Therefore, the good that Christians have done must be thought of as well as the bad.
In just these two instances of the Crusades and the Salem Witch Trials, an objective inquiry will reveal that although followers of Christ have been at times guilty of gross injustice, there are also forces at work which seek to distort those events for the purpose of vilifying Christianity.
However, even if these historical events have been distorted for use against Christianity, it does not thereby excuse the events themselves. Indeed, Christians must deal with the question of why Jesus’ followers don’t often seem to follow Jesus teaching about violence. The Christian doctrine of Sanctification teaches that as Christians grow in their faith, they become more and more like Jesus. But, Christian doctrine also teaches that we all continue to fall prey to sin, temptation, greed and evil. The history of the church it full of examples of people who sacrificially gave up everything: money, possessions, ease of life,etc.. in order to help others. The history of the church is also full of people who continued to pursue their own selfish gain after claiming to be converted to Christ.
Jesus told us that a tree would be identified by its fruit. A good tree will produce good fruit and a bad tree would produce bad fruit. At the end of the day, people to do wretched things cannot be associated with Jesus and his movement. Even though Christianity is a movement of heart change, it is also a movement where Jesus said, “they will know you are my followers by your love for one another.” Actions reflect heart intentions. Anyone who commits vicious acts of violence against others in the name of Jesus is not associated with him, even if they say that they are.
Jesus himself claimed the right to separate those who called themselves his followers versus those who really are his followers in Matthew 25. In that chapter, Jesus says, “Many will say to me on that day, Lord, Lord” but they won’t get into heaven. It is the people who actually do the will of Jesus that will be granted entrance into heaven. This is not a works based theology, but a doctrine which teaches that heart salvation will eventually be reflected in outward actions that reflect Jesus himself.
So, in conclusion, it cannot be claimed that Christianity is guilty of the worst atrocities in world history, it simply isn’t true. There have been people throughout history who have done terrible things, even in the name of Christ, but this can’t be placed at the feet of Jesus himself, who taught and lived a perfect model of God’s love.
About
Matt was born and raised in Carlsbad, Calif. Although he grew up in a devout Christian home, he struggled and rebelled against the Lord as a teenager. However, at eighteen, Matt gave in to God’s love and submitted to Jesus. Soon after, he met and married his wife Kelli. They now have six children and love the role that God has given them as parents.
In 1998, Matt graduated from Vanguard University with a degree in Ministry and Leadership. He is currently pursuing a Master’s Degree in Biblical Studies from Westminster Seminary, California. For the last eighteen years, he has worked for a variety of Christian ministries including Horizon Christian Fellowship, the Christian Research Institute, and Carlsbad Community Church.
In 2005, the Lord called Matt to plant Rancho del Rey Christian Church in Carlsbad, California. Matt’s heart desire is to help people see Jesus in all his glory. He and his wife are passionate about parenting, adoption, The Bible, missions, discipleship and helping people see Jesus in every aspect of life. His life’s calling is to present the Jesus of the Bible to people who don’t yet believe, and to encourage fellow Christ-followers to live in complete, life-altering obedience to God. He recently authored his first book, Read the Word: The Bible was written for you.
