Can I Know God Personally?

Can I know God personally?

Yes. But are you sure you want to?

I mean that question seriously. So seriously that I ask it of myself, and tremble in doing so. I do not take it for granted that I know God. Perhaps what I mean by that will become clear as I go on with this message.

I will begin with the stories of two men who thought they knew God but who came to a point in their lives where they weren’t so sure.

The first man was C. S. Lewis. Lewis was an atheist scholar who became a Christian in his early 30s. He then wrote many Christians works, including Mere Christianity and The Chronicles of Narnia. He had been a life-long bachelor until his late 50s. He then married a friend, Joy Gresham, who was soon diagnosed with terminal cancer. She was expected to die within weeks, but then made a miraculous recovery, and they had a blissful marriage. Lewis wrote, “Friendship gave way to pity which became love.” They loved each other dearly, and lived in the delight of unexpected life and unexpected romance. Then two years later the cancer returned, and she died. In the throes of his sorrow, Lewis wrote a classic memoir, A Grief Observed, in which he wrote the following:

Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be – or so it feels – welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?...Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not “So there’s no God after all,” but “So this is what God’s really like.”

Question: did C. S. Lewis know God? Please understand, he’s my idol. Part of me wants to ask, before answering too quickly the question “Can I know God personally?”, did C. S. Lewis know God personally? And if so, then how could he come to a point where he felt no connection with God whatsoever - or, still believing in God, could suspect that God was perhaps very different from what he had imagined him to be?

Second story concerns Gordon MacDonald. He was the pastor of an influential church in New England, eventually became president of the campus ministry Intervarsity. Around 1984 he was asked to be a candidate for head of an international Christian organization. I don’t know which one; he did not identify it. During the candidating process he later wrote that neither he nor his wife Gail had “ever asked God for omens or signs to determine future direction, but during these weeks, the dots seemed to line up. The books we read, the conversations we held, the prayers we prayed, the voice of God we heard in our souls – everything pointed to my getting this position. We felt God was saying, ‘This is going to happen.’” After his final interview when it had come down to him and one other candidate, his wife Gail said to him, “They’re going to ask you to be the next president.” He said, “That surprised me, because Gail is not prone to such pronouncements.”

So he prepared his resignation from the church he was serving, and called his staff together to tell them what was happening and that he would probably be moving on. Then he got the phone call telling him that the organization was going with the other candidate.

He wrote this:

Ten days later the full force of what happened crushed me. I submarined into the depths of disillusionment. At a subterranean level, I told God, “You’ve made a perfect fool of me. You drew me to the finish line and said, ‘I’m sorry.’ I no longer know your language. You speak a different language than I’ve been trained to understand.” I was questioning God, something I had never really done. I doubted whether it was possible to hear God speak.

I repeat my question: Did Pastor Gordon MacDonald know God personally? And if so, how could he be so baffled, so utterly wrong about what he presumed to be the leading of God that he could wind up saying, “God, you and I speak different languages. I don’t know yours. I have no idea what you’re saying.”

This problem is an old one. In Proverbs 30: 2-3 a man named Agur confesses, Surely I am too stupid to be a man. I have not the understanding of a man. I have not learned wisdom, nor do I have knowledge of the Holy One. That’s a strong statement from a teacher in Israel: “You’re asking me about God? What do I know about God?”

In response to the problem I have posed in these allusions to the experiences of others, let me offer a few thoughts arranged briefly under four headings.

First, knowing God is not the same as knowing about God.

We all know intuitively the difference between knowing someone and knowing about someone. I know some things about Lebron James and Meryl Streep and Joe Biden, but I don’t know them. And part of the proof that I don’t know them is the fact that they don’t know me. I could pick them out of a lineup because they are celebrities, but if you put me in a lineup in front of them, they would not pick me out as an acquaintance, and they wouldn’t know my name in the first place.

Likewise we can have significant knowledge about God the way we know about a celebrity, but not know him at all. The clearest indication of that is James 2:19 which says, You believe there is one God. Good! The demons believe that – and shudder. Demons are orthodox monotheists. There are no atheist demons. Demons are evil but they aren’t stupid. They even believe in the deity of Christ, his death on the cross for sinners, his resurrection from the dead. Their theological sophistication is advanced and accurate. But they do not know God. And just as Lebron James and Meryl Streep and Joe Biden don’t know me, so also, in the end, demons and all the damned will be declared unknown by Jesus Christ. That is shown to be the case in his awful words of judgment in Matthew 7:23: “I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.”

Knowing about God is not the same as knowing him. You can know a lot about God and still be an evil reprobate whom Jesus could not pick out of a lineup.

Number 2: Knowing God is not the same as understanding God.

Job 11:7 says, Can you fathom the deep things of God? Can you discover the limits of the Almighty? The answers to those rhetorical questions are no and no. God is beyond us. We cannot fathom his ways.

Isaiah 55:8-9: For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

An illustration might help convey that point. For those of you who have a pet dog, does your dog know you? Yes of course. The dog wags its tail at you and barks at a stranger. The dog knows what you smell like. We have all seen those videos of a soldier coming home from a tour of duty and the dog practically leaps out of its skin to welcome its master home. The dog knows its master. But does the dog understand its master? I little bit, I suppose. The dog recognizes its name when called. Maybe it knows a few simple commands – “sit,” “stay,” heel.” “Sic ‘im,” if it’s a warrior dog.

But ask yourself, does your dog know what you do for living? Of course not, it doesn’t have a clue. Does the dog know what you study in school? Your dog is illiterate. In this congregation I see Asian faces before me, and as an honorary Asian myself I get to stereotype. I bet some of you can do calculus. There may be some here who have solved differential equations, which is farther than I ever got. Well, your dog doesn’t even know the square root of 9. Your dog can’t add 7 and 4. And the gap between you and your dog’s comprehension of you is far, far narrower than the gap between God and your comprehension of him.

God is beyond our comprehension. You can believe in God, obey God, love God, and know God. But you’re not going to understand God fully, or comprehend more than rudimentary things about him. The Apostle Paul writes in Romans 11:33-34, Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor? Do not confuse knowing God with understanding God. The first is possible, the second is not. There will always be things about him that leave you stumped.

Number 3: Knowing God is not a matter of knowing what God is up to or what he is going to do.

There are exceptions to that, as when God reveals to a prophet some news about a future event and or reveals something about present or past reality which would normally be opaque. But more often than not, those things which are future to us or normally hidden from us remain hidden from us by God’s design and mercy. Both C. S. Lewis and Gordon MacDonald were mistaken about what they assumed to be God’s plan and purpose.

They’re not alone. King Josiah was probably the godliest of all 39 kings of Israel and Judah. He was a remarkable man. Do you know how he died? He got involved in a battle that frankly he should have stayed out of. Pharaoh Neco of Egypt went up to engage the king of Assyria, and Josiah went out to intercept him. It is recorded in 2 Kings 23 and 2 Chronicles 35. Josiah got killed in the process. Basically he made a mistake - he really should have stayed home. He wasn’t a bad man, he was a profoundly good man – but that did not keep him from being fundamentally mistaken about the victory that he seemed to assume that God would give him over Pharaoh Neco.

Great humility is in order for all of us lest we presume that our acquaintance with God makes us unerringly privy to the things that he is doing now or will do in the future. In James 4:13-15, Jesus’ half-brother James writes this: Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.”

Humility about human knowledge of the plan of God is reflected beautifully in one little word that St. Paul uses in Philemon verse 15. As he is writing a letter to reunite Onesimus with Philemon Paul writes Perhaps the reason he was separated from you for a little while was that you might have him back forever. Note that word “perhaps”. Paul does not say, “I know what God was up to in these circumstances. I’ve got it figured out.” No, he says, “perhaps” - “perhaps this is the reason.” God alone knows.

I try to be rigorous in my caution about statements that suggest that I know what God is doing and what his plans are. In 2003, after serving for some time as pulpit supply at Faith Bible Church I was called to be the pastor there. They had a ceremony installing me as pastor, and a Chicago area minister graciously agreed to officiate. He even wrote up a statement for me to repeat, kind of like a wedding vow. I wish I had a copy of it. Because I don’t remember the exact wording. But it was something along the lines of, “I know that God is calling me to serve this congregation as its pastor and faithfully to lead the people in proclamation of the Word and discipleship etc.” I contacted him beforehand and said, “I can’t say this, because while it does reflect my thinking, the truth is I don’t even know if I will be alive one minute from now. God has not revealed even that much to me, much less what his future designs are for this fellowship with me as its pastor. There is nothing in my theology that would make it impossible for an asteroid to wipe out the church building tonight! What I can say is “perhaps” and “maybe” and “if God so wills.” But I make no claims to be privy to the mind of God concerning his future plans in such matters. I don’t know him that well.

Does that mean that we never know the mind of God about anything? No, I would never go that far. I know it is God’s will that I not covet anything that belongs to my neighbor. I know it is God’s will that I not bear false witness, or be unfaithful to my wife, or steal, or that I take his name in vain, or worship other gods. I know it is his will that I love him with all my heart soul mind and strength, and that I love my neighbor as myself.

And that leads to my 4th observation about knowing God. My first 3 observations were all negative. Knowing God is not a matter of knowing about him. The demons know about him. It is not a matter of fully comprehending him and his ways. Nobody comprehends very much of him. It is not a matter of being confident in your own mind that you know what he’s up to and what he is going to do. The best of us make mistakes with those kinds of guesses.

My 4th observation is positive. Knowing God – knowing him “personally,” if you will - is a matter of obeying him. The Bible makes that simple point again and again and again.

In Jeremiah 22:15-16, Jeremiah is speaking to King Shallum (also known as Jehoahaz), who was a bad man. Shallum, believe it or not, was the son of Josiah, who as I mentioned before was the godliest king that Israel or Judah ever had. God speaks to Shallum through the prophet Jeremiah, saying, Your father did what was right and just, so all went well with him. He defended the cause of the poor and needy, and so all went well. Is that not what it means to know me? declares the Lord.

God equates doing what is right and just - for example, defending the cause of the poor and the needy - with knowing him. Josiah himself may have guessed very poorly about what God was up to. And as that battle against Pharaoh Neco went horribly wrong, perhaps as Josiah lay on the battlefield mortally wounded and bleeding out, he thought, “I guess I don’t know God after all. I don’t speak his language; he doesn’t speak mine. This didn’t work out the way I thought. Surely I am more stupid than any man and have no knowledge of the Holy One. If I knock on the door of heaven, will he hear me or bolt the door?” But whether he knew it or not, he knew God. His goodness, faithfulness, justice, fairness, and generosity were barometric indicators all proving that he knew God. And much more important, that God knew him, and would never say to him, “Depart from me you worker of iniquity. I never knew you,” but rather, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Welcome into the joy of your Master.”

Knowing God is a matter of obeying him. So many passages teach this. 1 John 2:3-4 says, And by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments. Whoever says “I know him” but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him.

1 John 3:6: No one who lives in him keeps on sinning. No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him.

Titus 1:16, speaking of the morally corrupt: They claim to know God, but they deny him by their works. They are detestable, disobedient, unfit for any good work.

One more text with this theme: 1 John 4:7-8: Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.

Love of course is the principle commandment. Jesus said that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart soul mind and strength, and the second greatest is to love your neighbor as yourself. All the law and prophets hang on these two commandments, Jesus said.

I began this talk by referring to two men, C. S. Lewis and Gordon MacDonald, who both came to awful moments of despair where they both wondered, “Do I know God at all – does he hear me, do I hear him, have all my assumptions been wrong?” It’s a terrible place to be. But at this point in their lives, the paths of these two men diverged. C S Lewis said his prayers, went to church, remained faithful, trudged one weary foot after another in painful obedience to what he knew to be right, and in a short time he recovered his spiritual bearings. I wonder if in his moments of darkness he recalled his own words written some 20 years earlier in The Screwtape Letters, which is an imaginary correspondence from a senior demon who coaches his nephew, Wormwood, on the art of tempting human beings. In Letter number 8, Screwtape writes this,

Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

Gordon MacDonald, on the other hand, went and had an extramarital affair. He did this over a period of several months despite having pastored a church and serving as Chairman of World Vision and President of Intervarsity. He cheated on his wife. Let me be clear. We are to love God and love our neighbor. Adultery is a selfish act of hatred against God and neighbor. Adultery expresses hatred of God, hatred of one’s spouse, and hatred of one’s children. It is one massive middle finger stuck in the face of God saying "Forget you, God. I know what you said about faithfulness and keeping my vows, but I value my pleasure over my spouse, my kids, my extended family, my church, and you, and incidentally the person whose life and faith I am probably destroying by cheating with her or him."

So my question now is, which man knew God, Gordon MacDonald or C. S. Lewis?

When Gordon MacDonald thought, “God, you and I don’t speak the same language. I doubt it is possible to hear you speak,” somebody needed to slap him upside the head and say, “Of course he speaks your language, you fool! Haven’t you heard that he has said things like, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery'? How hard is that to understand?"

God can be known, but he can only be known through obedience, and he cannot be known apart from obedience. That is why I gave what may have sounded like a strange answer to the question, “Can I know God personally?” Yes! But are you sure you want to? Because knowing God will involve being fully conformed to his image and fully submissive to his will, and that will entail an often painful process that you and I as corrupt sinners cannot begin to imagine. Even so, there will be some who say, “Yes, I want that. I want God. I want to know him, even it hurts, even if it costs me something, even if it costs me everything. I want to know my Maker, and be just the way he wants me to be.”

For such people I have good news. God loves you, and he has scaled himself down to human form in the person of Jesus Christ who died in order to bear the penalty for sin and forgive sinners, and he rose again from the dead with the kind of resurrection life that he pledges to give to all who follow him. Earlier I compared us to a dog, a pet dog who frankly understands very little of its master, but knows its master well enough to recognize his voice, detect his scent, and wag its tail in ecstatic delight when the master comes calling. The Bible does not call God’s loved ones "dogs." It prefers the term "sheep," which are even dumber than dogs. But I don’t mind that veiled insult when I read the words of Jesus, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand.”

Let us pray.

God, thank you for making yourself knowable through Jesus Christ. Grant to those of us who lack it a thirst to know you more. Hold before us the delight of being conformed to the image of your Son through whom we will increase in knowledge, in grace, in truth, and in love. To your everlasting glory through Jesus, Amen.

Is The Bible Reliable?

Is the Bible reliable?

Yes.

There are many ways in which the “reliability” of the Bible can be understood. For example, is it historically reliable in what it reports as events that occurred? Is it morally reliable as regard to the difference between right and wrong? Is it textually reliable – do the manuscripts that we have accurately reflect what was originally written down? Is it canonically reliable – were the right books chosen to be in the Bible and the wrong ones excluded?

It is impossible in a 30-minute sermon to go down all these rabbit trails. So I will pick a few and not even pretend that I am giving a comprehensive answer to an impossibly big question. I will cherry-pick. And I am going to be addressing, as it were, my 18-year-old self, stressing things that I think would have been helpful to me that I did not at that time have the tools to address. I will arrange this under 5 headings.

(1) We have an accurate representation of original manuscripts.

We don’t have any of the original texts of the Bible – the first handwritten manuscripts that prophets and apostles wrote down. What we have are copies of copies. And there are some differences between those copies, what are called textual variants. This provokes the question, how do we know what it originally said? This one turns out to be very easy, and really not much of an issue at all.

The fact is, there is no such thing as an original paper or vellum text of any ancient document. All you ever have are copies of copies, manuscripts written by hand before Gutenberg invented the printing press around 1450 and stabilized the process. For example, Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars. We have 10 manuscripts. The earliest of these is dated to 1000 years after the original writing. Pliny the Younger, 7 copies of his epistles, the earliest dated to 750 years after the original. Herodotus, Greek historian of the 5th century BC. We have 9 copies of his works, the earliest dated to 1400 years after the original. Typically, with all ancient literature, we have single-digit extant copies of full manuscripts, and more than 500 years of time between the original writing and the earliest known copies that we can hold in our hands. This is true of Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Euripides, Thucydides, etc.

For the Greek New Testament we have 5800 manuscripts, and the earliest of those, in terms of fragments, is dated to within 50 years of the original writing. It has rightly been called an embarrassment of riches. There are textual variants, but the vast majority of those are things like spelling differences, or obvious typos where the scribe accidentally left out a word, but we can see from comparing with other texts what that word was. In comparing these texts one with another, we have well over a 99% accuracy confidence rating. The few straggling leftovers are things like, did Jesus say “prayer and fasting” or just “prayer”? Is the mark of beast "666," or, as a couple early manuscripts have it, "616"? There are a handful of tough calls here and there, but they are always about very minor things, and even atheist textual critic Bart Ehrman has stated repeatedly that no Christian doctrine depends on any doubtful reading of any text. The effect of the massive amount of early texts that we have combined with straightforward scholarly detective work leave us with an extremely high degree of confidence that we do have the original wording even if we don’t have the original pages or scrolls. The textual reliability is off the charts, and need not keep anyone awake at night wondering what the apostles really wrote. We know what they wrote.

(2) Casual indications of stunning historical accuracy.

For this I want to zero in on some details in the book of Acts. Acts is the second volume of a two-volume set written by Luke: the Gospel of Luke, which is about Jesus, and the Acts of the Apostles, which is about the acts of the Apostles, or early church. These are big books, and together, by word-count, constitute over 25% of the New Testament.

In the mid 1800s some German scholars led by F. C. Bauer decided to apply their philosophy to the early history of the church without bothering to do any actual research. They decided that the book of Acts would have been written in the second half of the second century, maybe AD 160 or 170, by some guy claiming to be Luke, but it was really just a guy sitting at a desk 100 years later and making it up.

That view held a lot of influence for many years, but no real scholar believes it anymore because Luke is so scarily accurate in matters that we can verify that we know beyond any doubt that this was written by someone who was widely traveled around the Mediterranean world in the mid first century. Textual considerations indicate that we have an eyewitness to a number of the events that he covered. He refers to things that happened in places as diverse as Jerusalem, Thessalonica, Rome, Ephesus, Malta, Cyprus, Antioch - modern day Israel, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Syria, etc. One of the challenges that modern translators have is finding good equivalent terms for the Greek words that Luke uses for describing public officials in these various regions. In English, depending on your version of the Bible, you will see terms like “magistrate,” “town clerk,” “proconsul,” “city authority,” “chief official” “police,” or at a higher level, “governor” and “tetrarch.” These are all different words in Greek, and they vary from region to region. The amazing thing about Luke is that he gets the term right every time. It would not be possible for a later writer to be that accurate.

To put this in perspective with an analogy, I don’t know the difference between alderman and city councilman. Maybe they’re the same. Maybe you use one term in Chicago and a different one in Miami. I don’t know. But Luke knows. My favorite example of this is in Acts 17:6 where Luke uses the term politarchas (“city officials”) for some individuals in Thessalonica. This term is not found elsewhere in extant literature but has been confirmed by archaeological digs in Thessalonica itself. Luke was a painstaking journalist of the first order.

One more thing about Luke concerns the dating of his works. Luke records the main events of early church history from Jerusalem to Rome, but he does not record the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, the martyrdom of Peter and Paul in the mid 60s, or the burning of Rome and the great persecution of Christians that followed in AD 64. Why? Because those things hadn’t happened yet. Luke ends the book of Acts with Paul still alive in Rome, and that is in the early 60s. Now remember that Acts is a big book – it took some time to research it and write it, and it is the second volume of a two-volume series. So the first volume, the Gospel of Luke, is earlier than that – maybe the 50s. And beyond that, the Gospel of Luke incorporates a huge portion of the Gospel of Mark. Luke had the Gospel of Mark in front of him, whether in written or oral form, when he wrote his gospel. That means that Mark is even earlier. Maybe 40s, early 50s. The point I am trying to make is that these New Testament documents that demonstrate a stunning degree of historical accuracy in matters that we can verify, were written early, within living memory of the eyewitnesses. Jesus was crucified in AD 33. And we have detailed documents written about him only a couple decades later.

(3) The Significance of Irrelevant Details.

In the Bible you have instances of a phenomenon that never appears in fiction until the 1800s. And that is the sudden intrusion of a detail that doesn’t go anywhere, an extraneous bit of narrative that has no connection to the story. You have that in non-fiction all the time. But as a literary device for tall-tale fiction it did not exist back then. It is a recent development.

C. S. Lewis calls attention to one such incident in John 8. He writes, In the story of the woman taken in adultery we are told Christ bent down and scribbled in the dust with his finger. Nothing comes of this. No one has ever based any doctrine on it. And the art of inventing little irrelevant details to make an imaginary scene more convincing is a purely modern art. Surely the only explanation of this passage is that the thing really happened? The author put it in simply because he had seen it.

So in a modern novel – by “modern” I mean the past 200 years, you can have a scene where two characters are talking to one another and one interrupts to say, “Can I get you some coffee?” and the other says, “Sure. Light cream, no sugar.” He does that and they continue their dialogue. We know how to write scenes like that. But you don’t see that in Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Bunyan, or Swift. It is a technique in fiction that we employ and they did not. But if John did that in his gospel, if he was making it up, then he was a literacy genius with no precedent in the history of literature and no successors for 1800 years. That strains credibility. The fact is, we’re looking at eyewitness accounts.

An example I like to refer to comes in 1 Timothy 5:23. I will read that quickly in context with the two verses before and after it. Paul writes to Timothy, In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus and of the elect angels I charge you to keep these rules without prejudging, doing nothing from partiality. 22 Do not be hasty in the laying on of hands, nor take part in the sins of others; keep yourself pure. 23 (No longer drink only water, but use a little wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments.) 24 The sins of some people are conspicuous, going before them to judgment, but the sins of others appear later. 25 So also good works are conspicuous, and even those that are not cannot remain hidden.

There are scholars who have made the claim, with no good evidence, that 1 Timothy is a forgery. “Paul didn’t write this letter to Timothy. It’s a made-up document by someone who is pushing for a church order that included elders and deacons that we think were a later development in church history." In response we can say, there are such things as forgeries. The Gnostic cults produced a bunch of them a hundred or more years later. These were documents that were reputedly written in the name of an apostle, but they are transparently Gnostic propaganda. They are comparable to inane quotes today like “Hang in there! Keep on truckin’!” being attributed to Albert Einstein. Or “Remember: Keep it real” to Abraham Lincoln.

Among the many reasons we know that 1 Timothy is not a forgery is this out-of-blue extraneous detail where Paul is discussing the nature of sin and keeping oneself pure and the extent to which one’s true character can be hidden for a while but will eventually be revealed – and right in the middle Paul plops down the line: “Take some wine for your stomach ailments.” That is an authentic line to a young man who suffered from stomach problems. I won’t belabor the point, except to say that legends, fictions and forgeries of that era lacked the sophistication to throw in irrelevant details like that just to make you think that you were reading something real.

(4) The Irrelevance of Nickel-and-Dime Cheap Shots.

Here I may ruffle the feathers of some devout brothers and sisters in Christ. But it needs to be said, and I think it is something I needed to have heard about 40 years ago.

Countless attacks on the reliability of Scripture and countless defenses of the reliability of Scripture revolve around alleged discrepancies. For example, the healing of the blind man of Jericho. Mark 10:45 says that it happened as Jesus was leaving Jericho. Luke 18:35 says it happened as Jesus was approaching Jericho. So which is it? Did Jesus heal the blind man while he was going into Jericho or coming out of it?

Oh, the ink that has been spilled on this and related matters! There are many proposals to reconcile these two texts. I have seen it claimed that Jesus was leaving Old Jericho and entering New Jericho. Or maybe the blind man followed him as he walked all the way through Jericho and Jesus didn’t heal him until he was about to leave. Or Matthew mentions two blind men, maybe one was at the entrance and one at the exit.

May I humbly suggest that such efforts are a huge waste of time, and a ridiculous distraction? I don’t get my undies in a bunch over the precise location in Jericho of the healing of the blind man. The important thing is that Jesus healed a blind man! That’s the lede that should concern us. Or take for example whether Jesus liberated a man from demons near the town of Gerasa (according to Mark) or Gadara (according to Matthew). As far as I’m concerned, who cares? Someone might say, “Well, you should care, if you believe the Bible to be true and perfectly reliable.” I do believe the Bible to be true and reliable. That doesn’t mean I have to nickel-and-dime every obscure picky detail that comes my way.

The reason I refuse to nickel-and-dime the text like that is because the text refuses to nickel-and-dime itself. Let me explain what I mean.

In 1 Corinthians 1:14-15 Paul says, “I thank God that I did not baptize any of you except Crispus and Gaius, so no one can say that you were baptized in my name.” Question: how many people did Paul baptize in Corinth? Two. Crispus and Gaius. Is the Bible true? Is the Bible reliable? Yes. Therefore Paul baptized two and only two people in Corinth. But in the very next verse Paul says, “Yes, I also baptized the household of Stephanas; beyond that, I don’t remember if I baptized anyone else.”

It is not hard to imagine that as Paul dictated this letter to his amanuensis, his scribe, Sosthenes, that when Paul said he only baptized Crispus and Gaius that Sosthenes laid down his quill and said, “Paul, didn’t you baptize Stephanus and his family too?” And Paul says, “Oh yes, that’s right, I did baptize them too. Put that in there.” As far as I’m concerned, the correction in verse 16 to the minor negligible unimportant error in verse 14 is not a threat to biblical reliability and should not be regarded as such. In exactly the same way, as Matthew reads over the gospel of Mark (the first gospel written), and sees that Mark placed a demonic expulsion near Gerasa, Matthew can do a “Sosthenes” and say, “No, I was there. That was actually closer to Gadara a few miles away. When I write my gospel I’m making it Gadara.”

In a seminary class I took years ago, the professor tried to reconcile a statement in Stephen’s farewell sermon, just before he was martyred, where he said in Acts 7:14 that the patriarch Joseph “sent for his father Jacob and his whole family, seventy-five in all.” Note: Seventy-five. But Genesis 46:27 says that the number of people in Jacob’s family who went to Egypt were 70 in all. Oh no, we have a discrepancy! Was it 70 or 75? Well you can imagine all kinds of ways to reconcile the texts if you are creative. Maybe 5 people were invited but didn’t make the trip. Maybe 5 died on the way.

I raised my hand in class and provoked some oohs and ahhs when I said, Why should we think there’s a discrepancy? Maybe Stephen said 75, and Luke carefully and accurately recorded that he said 75, but he happened to get the number wrong. This is an impromptu sermon where he didn’t have his notes and people were waiting to stone him to death. Again, I can picture one of the Pharisees, just like Sosthenes, putting down his rock for a moment, and saying, “Stephen? You said 75? I think you mean 70, right?” and Stephen saying, “Was it 70? My bad. Thanks. 70 then. As I was saying…” And then he finishes his sermon and they pelt him with rocks.

The Gospel of John says in chapter 3:22 that Jesus baptized. Is that true? Is it reliable? Here is what it says: “After this, Jesus and his disciples went out into the Judean countryside, where he spent some time with them, and baptized.”

But the very next chapter gives an important correction. John 4:1-2: “Now Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that he was gaining and baptizing more disciples than John— 2 although in fact it was not Jesus who baptized, but his disciples.”

Did Jesus baptize people? John 3:22 says he did. But then John 4:2 says, “To be more precise, it was Jesus’ disciples who did the baptizing.” That is a perfect example of what I mean by saying that the Bible does not nickel-and-dime itself about picky little details. It can give these little auto-corrections without saying, “Oh no! I misstated that detail earlier – I guess I must not be inspired after all and I had better stop writing this Gospel.” My simple point is that nickel-and-diming obscure details is not a wise or biblical thing to do. I believe that many sincere Christians make a categorical mistake when bend over backwards to reconcile picky little discrepancies that were not a concern to the writers themselves and certainly not a threat to their overall reliability.

(5) Pay Attention to Genre. (Genre means type of literature.)

Here is a provocative question. Are there fables in the Bible? Stories that were just made up to make some point or elicit some behavior? Yes, absolutely. They’re called parables. Jesus told a bunch of them. The Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son. No one ever seems to ask, “Did the Good Samaritan exist in real life?” Well, he may have. As far as we know that could be a true story. But I think most people regard it as fiction – but fiction told with the important point of explaining the best answer to the question, “Who is my neighbor whom I must love as myself?”

Are there fables in the Old Testament? Absolutely. Here is what Jotham says in Judges chapter 9. He said, “Listen to me, citizens of Shechem, so that God may listen to you. 8 One day the trees went out to anoint a king for themselves. They said to the olive tree, ‘Be our king.’ 9 “But the olive tree answered, ‘Should I give up my oil, by which both gods and humans are honored, to hold sway over the trees?’ 10 “Next, the trees said to the fig tree, ‘Come and be our king.’” And it continues like that.

Do trees talk? Do trees anoint kings? Of course not. Everybody knows that’s a fable. Anyone who cannot see that instantly doesn’t understand the nature of human discourse. Jotham knew it was a fable, his audience knew it, and we know it.

Now I’ve got a tougher question. Is it always easy to tell whether we are reading a fable, or a straightforward historical narrative, or a historical narrative with some fabulous elements? Do we have an infallible algorithm, a set of rigid protocols that unerringly make those distinctions?

I humbly suggest that making distinctions between the symbolic and the concrete, the historical and the fabulous can be harder than It looks, and will require us to be grownups who think and reason, and study and pray and sometimes suspend judgment until we have cause to be more certain.

Two cases in point. The story Jesus told a story in Luke 16 of a rich man and Lazarus. Is it a parable or a history? A poor miserable man named Lazarus lives outside the gates of a rich man who ignores him. They both die, the rich man goes to hell and the poor man goes to heaven. But they can see each other in their respective states, and the rich man carries on a conversation with the poor man’s protector, Abraham. Is that a made-up story like the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son? Is it a true history in all its details? And if so, can departed souls in heaven and hell see other and carry on conversations across a chasm that, though deep, must be awfully narrow if they can talk across it? Or is it a partially true story with fabulous elements? I think that if I had to bet, that is where my money might go. That is, that there really was a poor man named Lazarus, and a rich neighbor who was mean to him, and they died and went to different eternal destinies. And my suspicion is that Jesus used that reality to express in parabolic form truths about obedience and repentance and pride and responding to the truth that we have before us. I could be wrong. But I don’t think I’m wrong about my conviction that it is a tough-to-resolve question.

John Calvin was unable to resolve in his own mind the historicity of Job. John Calvin was no liberal, and he was certainly no dummy. The man’s knowledge of the Scriptures was breathtaking. He left it as an open question whether Job existed. Maybe he did. Or maybe this is a 42-chapter epic poem/parable on the nature of suffering and the sovereignty of God. If it is simply historical, I still think it is ok to ask the question: Can Satan really pay a visit to heaven, and he and God have a conversation where God brags to him about one of us and Satan says, “Let me tear him apart” – is that actually the way it happened in reality, or is that the way it can best be communicated to us?

I don’t mean to muddy the waters to the point where it is impossible to be certain about the proper way to understand anything in the Bible. There are many things presented as unmistakably historical, and the writers go out of their way to tell us that. In 2 Peter 1:18 Peter writes, “We did not follow cleverly devised stories when we told you about the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in power, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.” And John opens his first epistle with the words, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.” There you could not be more explicit about the concrete historical nature of what Peter and John were presenting about Jesus. There was no parable or poetic license there.

But over the years I have seen that many attacks on the Bible along with many well-intentioned but simplistic defenses of the Bible have crucially depended on misreading poetry and parable as history and narrative. That’s a categorical mistake that has led despisers of the Bible to be contemptuous, and zealous defenders of the Bible to look foolish. Yes the Bible is reliable, but that fact does not allow you to be simplistic and naive, and to ignore complex and thoughtful issues about literary genre.

I close with this. King David, in real history, committed adultery and murder. He slept with the wife of a friend, Uriah, while Uriah was away at war. The woman, Bathsheba, got pregnant, and David orchestrated Uriah’s death. When Nathan the prophet confronted David with his sin, he did so with a story. He told him the story of a rich man and a poor man. The rich man had many flocks, and the poor man had one ewe lamb that was dear to him and that the family treated like a pet. When the rich man had a visitor, instead of slaughtering one of his own lambs for supper he stole the poor man’s pet and slaughtered it. David said, “That man must die!” And Nathan said, “You are that man!” David knew that to be true, and he repented.

Question: How was David “that man”? Was Nathan’s story true? Did it really happen? Was it “reliable”? Well, some of the details line up with David’s sin, but not all of them. A wealthy man with plenty takes advantage of a poor man. But in the one case it’s a lamb and in the other case a woman. The woman is slept with, but the lamb is killed and eaten. The poor man isn’t murdered, but Uriah was. If you’re looking at it as simple history, the story is not true. If it is a mere fable, the story does not really convict. If it is meant to be a perfect analogy, then, as we have shown, it breaks down at several points because the correspondences are so inexact. You know what the story is? It’s true in a way that makes David say instantly. “That’s right. I see it. I am that man. I am the guilty one.”

The Bible is utterly reliable in that rightly understood, it makes us see that we are that man, that woman - desperately sinful, guilty as hell, and in urgent need of grace for repentance, forgiveness, and restoration to God.

Is Jesus Really God?

Is Jesus really God?

Yes.

His followers claimed that he was God – even his immediate followers, the ones who knew him or had met him and who wrote about him within a few years of his crucifixion. Sometimes it is claimed that ideas about Jesus’ divinity did not arise until later, hundreds of years later, and that no one really thought of him as God until Christianity developed as a world religion under the influence of the Emperor Constantine in the 4th century. But that view does not withstand even a few minutes’ scrutiny of first century documents.

Here are some quotes from 1st century Christians writing within living memory of Jesus himself.

Hebrews 1:7-8: The writer contrasts the voice of God talking about angels as opposed to his Son Jesus: “In speaking of the angels he says, ‘He makes his angels spirits, and his servants flames of fire.’ But about the Son he says, ‘Your throne, O God, will last for ever and ever.’” In this text, God the Father calls Jesus the Son “God.”

Romans 9:5: The Apostle Paul, writing about the spiritual advantages of the Jews: “To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ, who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen.” It is a parenthetical note in which Paul identifies Jesus as God, according to the preferred reading of the Greek text.

Titus 2:13: Paul tells Christians to live godly lives “while we wait for the blessed hope—the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.” The grammar of this sentence might be ambiguous in English and refer to two individuals: (1) our great God and (2) Savior Jesus Christ. But again, the best reading of the Greek text is that the phrase “great God and Savior” modifies the name that follows: Jesus Christ. That is, Paul calls Jesus “our great God and Savior.”

John 20:28: The disciple Thomas had heard from the other disciples that Jesus had met with them alive after he had been killed on the cross. Thomas did not believe them. Dead men don’t resurrect. Not even Jesus could do that, in Thomas’ mind. Then Jesus appears to Thomas and invites him to survey the crucifixion wounds in his hands and side. Thomas says to him, “My Lord and my God!”

The next series of references require some background information. In Revelation 19:10, John is tempted to worship an angel. He writes, “At this I fell at his feet to worship him. But he said to me, ‘Don’t do that! I am a fellow servant with you and with your brothers and sisters who hold to the testimony of Jesus. Worship God!’”

John was forbidden to fall before the feet of an angel. You are only supposed to do that to God. But John was a slow learner. Three chapters later he repeats his mistake. Revelation 22:8-9: “And when I had heard and seen these things, I fell down to worship at the feet of the angel who had been showing them to me. But he said to me, ‘Don’t do that! I am a fellow servant with you and with your fellow prophets and with all who keep the words of this scroll. Worship God!’”

The Biblical commandment is to worship God, only God. The Jews knew that. To worship that which is not God is idolatry, and it is forbidden. When a servant of God, whether human or angelic, finds himself or herself the object of worship, he or she cries out in indignation to put a stop to that blasphemy. “Don’t worship me! Worship God alone!”

For example, in Acts 14, the people of Lystra tried to respond to the ministry of Paul and Barnabas by worshiping them. The people said in verse 11, “The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men!” And in verse 13 it says that the local priest of Zeus brought oxen to gates of the city in order to slaughter them as a sacrifice to these god-men. Paul and Barnabas responded by tearing their robes in protest, and they cried out in verse 15, “Men, why are you doing these things? We also are men, of like nature with you.”

A similar thing happened to Peter four chapters earlier. In Acts 10 he went to the home of a Roman centurion named Cornelius. Verse 25 and 26 say this, “When Peter entered, Cornelius met him and fell down at his feet and worshiped him. But Peter lifted him up, saying, ‘Stand up; I too am a man.’”

These men - John, Paul, and Peter – who all knew very well that you were not to fall at the feet of a human being or even a mighty angel, and who stopped people who tried to do it to them – all three of them fell at the feet of Jesus. Peter did it in Luke 5:8, Paul did it Acts 9:4, and John did it in Revelation 1:17. That is where John writes, “I fell at his feet as one dead.” Thomas had said, “My Lord and my God” with his words; Peter and Paul and John said it with their posture as well, falling at his feet in an attitude of worship. So did the women who first saw Jesus after his resurrection. Matthew 28:9 says, "They came to him, clasped his feet and worshiped him." These people who worshiped Jesus were all devout Jews who only worshiped God.

There is much more that could be added to this theme of the followers of Jesus regarding him as God, but for the sake of time we must move on.

Not only did Jesus’ followers claim that he was God; his enemies accused him of claiming to be God.

In John 10:31 it says that some of the Jews picked up stones to stone Jesus. This was the action of a lynch mob. Legally they did not have the authority to put anyone to death, because they were living under Roman rule, and Rome claimed solely for itself the power of capital punishment. That is why Jesus was eventually killed by crucifixion rather than some other method. The Jews never crucified anyone. It was the Romans who executed criminals by crucifying them. But if a lynch mob of Jews wanted to kill somebody on the spot, without a trial, quickly before any Roman authority showed up to stop it, they would pick up rocks and pelt the person with them until he or she died. A couple chapters earlier they had brought to Jesus a woman caught in the act of adultery and provocatively asked him if they should stone her to death.

Why, in John chapter 10, were they planning to kill Jesus on the spur of the moment? Because he had just said, at the end of a speech declaring his role: “I and the Father are one.” They picked up stones to stone him, and Jesus said to them, “I have shown you many good works from the Father; for which of them are you going to stone me?” And they said, “It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you but for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself God.”

This wasn’t the only time that happened. John chapter 5 records another instance of the same thing. They thought he had committed a violation of the commandment concerning Sabbath rest. He responded by saying that he was doing the work that his Father did. He said, “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working.” Then verse 18 says, “For this reason they tried all the more to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.” So his enemies saw that he was claiming to be God.

On another occasion people grumbled about what they perceived to be an implicit claim to be God on Jesus’ part. In Mark 2 Jesus says to a paralyzed man whom he has just met for the first time, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” The text continues, “Now some teachers of the law were sitting there, thinking to themselves, ‘Why does this fellow talk like that? He’s blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?’”

They were right. They were making the point that only God could do what Jesus was claiming to do – forgive all of a person’s sins. Please understand an important distinction. If I commit an offense against you, and I come to you and apologize, you might be gracious to me and forgive me. Or if you sin against me, and if I’m trying to be a good Christian, I’ll forgive you. But suppose somebody knocks you on the head with a crowbar and steals your wallet. You tell me about it, as you recover from your concussion on a hospital bed, and I say, “Oh, I’ve forgiven the man who did that to you.” Wouldn’t you find that odd? Wouldn’t you think, “Who do you think you are, forgiving my assailant like that? You don’t have the right to forgive him!” And you would be exactly right. Only God has the right to do that. Only God, as the One Against Whom all sins are committed, has the judicial standing to forgive all of a person’s sins. We can only forgive the sins that are committed against us.

The people who felt that Jesus was claiming to be God when he told this man his sins were forgiven had a good point. That was in fact a fair accusation.

Jesus’ friends said that he was God. Jesus’ enemies said that he claimed to be God. What about Jesus himself?

I noted a few minutes ago that when people fell at the feet of Peter and Paul and Barnabas and a mighty angel, they all said, “Don’t do that! Get up.” But when Peter and Thomas and Paul and Mary Magdalene fell down at the feet of Jesus, he accepted it. He did not tell them to stop that nonsense because he was unworthy of such worship. When Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God,” Jesus did not tear his clothes in protest. He did not say that was blasphemy. Instead he said, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29).

What a way to respond to someone who has just called you God! Jesus accepted the designation. And he pronounced blessed all who believed the same.

The night before Jesus was crucified, one of his disciples, Philip, said to him, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.” And Jesus said, “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:8-9).

Then there is the amazing thing Jesus said about himself in John chapter 8. In John 8 Jesus’ opponents made a reference to their ancestor, Father Abraham, who had lived 2,000 years earlier. They taunted Jesus, saying, “Do you think you are greater than our Father Abraham?” And Jesus replied, “Before Abraham was born, I am.” Jesus was not merely claiming to be older than Abraham. He was taking unto himself the designation “I Am”, which is the personal name that God gave to Moses to identify himself to the Israelites as their one true God. God gave that name, sometimes known as Jehovah, or Yahveh. And down through the years Jewish people so revered that name that they were afraid to say it out loud or even write it down for fear of blaspheming the name by accident. Jesus was not only unafraid to say it – he called himself that. By now you can guess what happened next. They picked up stones to kill him. But he slipped away. It was not yet his time to die. That would have to be done on a cross, eventually.

Is Jesus really God? His friends said it, his enemies accused him of saying it, and he said it himself, both directly and by implication, many times.

But is it true? Is Jesus really God?

For me at least, there is a preliminary question worth exploring that many people have asked in one way or another. And that is, “How does that question even make sense? How can a human being, any human being, truly be God?”

Let me make a devil’s-advocate case for this being a nonsensical question. First of all, define God. Well, traditionally, God is the Ultimate Being, the Creator of all things visible and invisible. He is eternal, existing outside of time. He is spiritual, existing outside of space and matter. In fact, time and space and matter are all things that he created, so he is not subject to them; he is not contained in any of those things. He is omnipresent, present at each point in his creation without being a part of it. He is omniscient, knowing all things. He is omnipotent, all powerful. And Jesus does not seem to be any of those things that define God.

Was he omnipotent? He was so weak he could not even carry his own cross. He fell down under the burden of the crossbeam, and someone else had to carry it. Was he omniscient? Did he know everything? He himself said he did not know the day of his return. Was he omnipresent? No, clearly not. When Mary and Joseph left him behind in Jerusalem at the age of 12, they had to come back and look for him, because he couldn’t be both in Jerusalem and with them on the road to Nazareth at the same time. He was not omnipresent. Was he a spirit? No. In fact, when his disciples saw him once after his crucifixion and thought they were seeing a ghost, he said to them in Luke 24:39: “See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” Jesus had said to a Samaritan woman in John 4, “God is a spirit,” but then here in Luke 24 he said, “I am not a spirit; I’m flesh and blood.”

So, if God is defined as an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, eternal spirit, how can a weak, limited, flesh-and-blood human being living on earth in the first century be God? Don’t his obvious characteristics contradict what we believe to be the characteristics of God?

And with Jesus the problem is compounded because he did things like pray to God the Father. If he was God, then who in the world was he talking to when he prayed? Was he talking to himself? When he cried out from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” was he really saying, “Myself, Myself, why have I forsaken me?” How could he be God?

The Christian answer to such questions as I have raised here is two-fold. First, God is a complex God. He is one God, but he is not reducible to a naked singularity. God exists, and always has existed, as a Trinity, a complex Godhead of three persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

We get indications of this plural nature of God back in the Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures written hundreds of years before Jesus was born. Even in the beginning, in the book of Genesis, at the creation of mankind, God says, “Let us make man in our image.” Us? Our image? Where did that come from? Don’t you mean “me and my image”? No, even then, the eternal conversation was going on between what we call the persons of the Godhead.

We also get these indications of God’s plural nature in the Old Testament where you have appearances of a messenger of the Lord who is also the Lord. There is a weird ambiguity in the language describing these events, and it can be confusing to us, but it is unmistakably right there on the page in Genesis 16 with Hagar, Genesis 22 with Abraham, Exodus 3 with Moses, and Judges 6 with Gideon. In each of these events, an individual visitor is specified as an angel of the Lord, or a messenger of the Lord, and then as the text continues it becomes clear that it is the Lord himself who has been speaking to Hagar, Abraham, Moses and Gideon. Somehow the messenger of the Lord is also the Lord. Make of it what you will.

That leads to the second part of the answer Christianity gives to the question “How can it make sense that Jesus is God?” Well first of all, God is complex, he exists not as a simple unity but as a 3-fold complexity. Jesus then is one of those Persons of the Trinity, just as God the Father and God the Spirit are the other Persons of that Trinity. Second, one of the Persons of the Trinity, whom John called the Word, the Logos, has taken on human flesh. One of the Persons of the Triune God has taken human form - yes, with its limitations and weaknesses, its confinement in time and space and matter, and even mortality. The word for that is “incarnation” - the taking on of human form. The Apostle Paul in Philippians 2 describes this event as an emptying. He writes that though Jesus was equal with God, he emptied himself, and took the form of a servant in the likeness of man. (Philippians 2:6-7).

In Jesus, God became a man, and in that state willingly relinquished the independent use of some of those defining attributes of God that we mentioned. As John puts it, “The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.” (John 1:14).

Why did he do that?

One reason was to make God known to us - to help us to see in human form what God is like. John opens his gospel by saying, “In the beginning was the Word [Jesus]. And the Word was with God and the Word was God.” Again, there is that Trinitarian language. Jesus was with God and he was God. He was the messenger of God and the message of God and he was God. And then a few verses later, verse 18, it says, “No one has ever seen God.” That is, no one has ever seen God the Father. That makes sense. Of course you can’t see him – he’s a spirit, and spirits do not emit or reflect photons. But, the verse continues, “the only God, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known.” That is, Jesus, who is God, has made God the Father known. If you have trouble getting a grasp on what God is like, look at Jesus. Jesus reveals God the Father. As we mentioned earlier, Jesus told Philip, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” To know Jesus is to know God.

So Jesus became a man to show us what God is like.

But that is not the only reason. There is another reason that will take your breath away and knock you flat on your face if you understand it and believe it. Though he was God, he took on human form so that he could render to you the ultimate service – death on your behalf, a bloody death on the cross in order to save your sinful soul. As God he could not die. He’s immortal. But as a man he could die, and did. In Matthew 20:28 he explained it this way. He said, “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

Unfortunately we don’t have a good word in English to translate the Greek that is rendered as “ransom.” I think for us a “ransom” is the bag of money you give to the villains who kidnapped your loved one. But here it is the price of a slave. The amount that must given in order for a slave to acquire his or her freedom. It’s the wage price. The Bible says that the wages of sin is death, and Jesus said “I’m here to pay the wages. Only my death will suffice to pay the wages and cancel the sin debt and set you free.”

Yes, Jesus is God. He is God in human form. He took on human form in order to show us what God is like, and in showing us what God is like he manifested God’s inconceivable love in offering up his life in order to save human beings who had rebelled against him and held him in contempt.

I would like to answer one last question. Is there any of knowing that this is true about Jesus? Yes, there is. But you may not like it.

In John 7:17 Jesus said, “If anyone is willing to do God’s will, he will know whether my teaching is from God or whether I am speaking of my own authority.”

If you are willing to do God’s will, then you will know for sure the identity of Jesus and the source of his teaching. That will require repentance on your part. It does for all of us, there are no exceptions. We may have different things to repent of, but none of us can skirt along without it. I’m just glad that Jesus put it the way he did in that verse. He did not say, “If anyone does God’s will, he will know…” I don’t always do God’s will, and I would fail on that score. Nor does he say, “If anyone is able to do God’s will.” I am often unable. But he says, “If anyone is willing to do God’s will.” The question for us is, “Are you willing?” Do you really want that? Do you want to be holy more than anything else? Do you want to be a humble and penitent person who is being remade in the image of the God who loves you? If you are willing, then there will come a time when you are not wrestling with the question, “Is Jesus really God?” Because you will know.

Let us pray.

Father God, I thank you that God your Son has made you known to us, revealed your character to us, and made manifest to us a love beyond all reckoning, that he should become one of us in order to die on our behalf that we might be forever reconciled to you, against whom we have committed every sin. May God your Holy Spirit make this truth known, felt, and believed by all who hear this message. Grant to unworthy sinners the gift of repentance whereby they might become joyfully assured that Jesus is God and Savior. Amen.

Is Christianity Too Narrow?

Is Christianity too narrow?

Yes. Christianity is much too narrow for most people.

I do not know if that is the expected answer for those who are participating in the Explore God program. Throughout the Chicago area preachers are considering 7 questions on consecutive weeks, and this is question number 4. There are program resources available for those who are preaching through this series. I made a decision, for better or for worse, not to consult them because it was important to me that this come straight from my heart and avoid all appearances of a canned presentation. Tomorrow I will go online and find out what other preachers are saying about this question. I am curious.

I know my answer is sobering and unsettling. But it is something that I see taught in Scripture explicitly again and again and again. Christianity is much too narrow for most people. I will outline five categories in which I find this to be the case.

One. It is too narrow for most rich people. Jesus said, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” Of course that is an exaggeration, and a metaphor – but it is not meaningless. In the Bible, riches are a hindrance rather than a help toward membership in the realm of God toward which we are invited in Jesus Christ. The apostle Paul writes in 1 Timothy 6:9: “Those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction.”

Of course it is not impossible for a rich person to be a saved Christian. It is just very difficult. Jesus said in Mark chapel 10:32, “How difficult it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” The next verse says that the disciples were amazed at his words. Maybe they were as amazed at his words as some of you are if you are hearing this for the first time. But there it is. The disciples were so floored by what Jesus said that he found it necessary to repeat himself. Here’s the text:

Mark 10:23-27: And Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How difficult it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” 24 And the disciples were amazed at his words. But Jesus said to them again, “Children, how difficult it is to enter the kingdom of God! 25 It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” 26 And they were exceedingly astonished, and said to him, “Then who can be saved?” 27 Jesus looked at them and said, “With man it is impossible, but not with God. For all things are possible with God.”

It is possible, but very difficult, for a rich person to be a true Christian. If you are rich, then for the love of God and the security of your soul, start being so generous with your wealth that you can no longer indulge yourself with needless luxuries. If you are not rich, do not envy rich people and do not long to be one of them. Most of those people are not disciples of Christ and have no share in his reign. Christianity is too narrow for most rich people.

Number 2: Christianity is too narrow for the proud.

The Bible says God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. It says that in James 4:6 and 1 Peter 5:5.

There is an experience that is common to many ministers or pastors. Because to some individuals we represent God, there can be a curious effect on their behavior when they discover our vocation. They start telling us their good deeds. One minister likened this to meeting somebody at a social function and discovering that the individual is a dentist. You say, “Oh you’re dentist. Very good. Well, I try to floss…”

It is comical of course when a person with a live conscience tries to persuade Reverend So-and-So that he or she is really a pretty good person. But on a more serious note, you hope that that attitude does not spring from a deeper and more diabolical pride that truly believes in one’s own goodness and is not afraid to tell God that.

In Luke 18 Jesus told the story of a man who went to the temple and told God how good he was. The man was careful to couch his boastfulness in the pious language of thanksgiving, but Jesus was not fooled by that. You know how some people will apologize for something, but do so in a way that really casts the blame on the victim? Well this man “thanked God” but did so in language that made it clear that he thought God should be thanking him. He said, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.”

Meanwhile the tax collector that the man referred to stood at a distance. He was too ashamed to approach. Jesus said that that man would not look heavenward, which was the custom when people prayed. Instead he looked down, beat his breast and said, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Jesus said that man went home justified. That man went home right with God - but not the man who bragged to God about his goodness. Then Jesus said, “All those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

I have noticed lately on social media a trend that I find problematic in this regard: people filming themselves doing good deeds. They will plant a camera at some spot or they will get a friend to hold the camera for them as they give a homeless man a shirt, or buy new a guitar for a street musician. They take a photo of the hundred dollar bill they just gave to a single mom waitress. Well. It is good to do good. And I suppose, generally speaking, it is better to film oneself doing good than to film oneself doing evil. But it is never good to fuel confidence and pride in one’s own goodness. That kind of blissful self-regard alienates you from God. Do not justify such self-promotion and self-aggrandizement with the convenient excuse, “This will inspire other people; I’m really doing it for their good.” Jesus said concerning people who call attention to their goodness that they already have their reward in full. He also said, “When you give, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.” Do not focus on your goodness. Do not set your eyes or the eyes of others on how wonderful you are being.

Christianity is not a place for people for people to celebrate their goodness but rather to repent of their badness. God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. Christianity is too narrow for the proud.

Third, Christianity is too narrow for those who are only in it for the goodies.

My point here can perhaps best be expressed by what happens in John chapter 6. At the beginning of that chapter Jesus feels compassion for a crowd of people who have listened to him speak and are now getting hungry. He feeds them miraculously by multiplying two fish and five loaves that feeds 5,000 men plus women and children. The story of the feeding of the 5,000 is a famous miracle recorded in all four gospels - Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Less famous is what happens the very next day. The night following that feeding, Jesus and his disciples crossed over a lake, the Sea of Galilee. A huge crowd walked around the tip of the lake and met them on the other side.

Why did they follow him around the lake? Jesus told them why they did it in verse 26. He said you came here because “you ate the loaves of bread and had your fill.” They wanted him to do it again. They wanted another free meal.

Jesus did not give it to them. They were focusing on the wrong thing. He said in verse 27, “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you.” But they wouldn’t let it go. They came for a free meal, and one way or another they were going to get that free meal. "I mean for crying out loud, I skipped breakfast for this. What is Jesus good for if he’s only going to give us one free lunch? That’s it? No more? Well if that’s the way it is going to be, I'm out of here.” So they tried to goad him into doing it again with the most thinly veiled hint you have ever heard. In verses 30 and 31 they say, “What sign do you do, that we may see and believe you? What work do you perform? Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’” Hint hint.

They were saying, “Moses did it for 40 years. What about you? Let’s see you do that bread trick again.”

In the verses that follow, Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life.” If they were to believe in him and follow him, he would be their eternal nutrition - though on that particular day, they would have to go hungry, or perhaps go and buy their own food, or work for it.

The majority walked away. The great crowd evaporated. It narrowed down from thousands of people to just a handful. In verses 66 and 67 it says, "After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him. So Jesus said to the twelve, 'Do you want to go away as well?'”

False Christians, as soon as they find out that they are not getting goodies, walk away from Jesus. The fact is, Christianity is too narrow for them.

If you go home and turn on your TV, you will find religious broadcasts by sons and daughters of hell, many of them millionaires, who make a point of tailoring their message to and extracting huge sums of money from the kind of people who walked away from Jesus in John chapter 6. That is, the people who came to Jesus merely for stuff. Food, healing, money, success, prosperity, blessing. “That’s it, that’s all I want. I want my best life now.”

Jesus preferred to have a small group of 12 who wanted him as their bread of life to having a throng of thousands who just wanted the stuff that his miraculous power could provide. Now that is a narrow subsection of the whole. When Jesus asked his small band of disciples if they wanted to leave also, Peter spoke for them and said, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.” So Christianity is narrow, too narrow for those who only want goodies - but it is not too narrow for those who believe that whether they eat today or not, Jesus is the Holy One of God, and he alone has the words of eternal life.

Fourth, Christianity is too narrow for those who will not have Jesus as their ultimate priority. In Luke 9, there is a quick series of three vignettes in which three people almost follow Jesus. They seem willing, as long as a few conditions are met. Perfectly reasonable conditions. But in each case, Jesus does not say, “Glad to have you aboard! I’ll see what I can do to accommodate you.” Instead he points out a competing interest that they have, and he demands total allegiance that supersedes all such competing claims.

I will read the passage and make a few comments. Luke 9:57-62:

As they were going along the road, someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” 58 And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” 59 To another he said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.” 60 And Jesus said to him, “Leave the dead to bury their own dead. But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” 61 Yet another said, “I will follow you, Lord, but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” 62 Jesus said to him, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

Shocking. To the first man, Jesus says, “Foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” That is, even animals have homes, but I’m homeless. Are you willing to follow me even if it means you don’t know where you will sleep tonight? When push comes to shove, Jesus says, am I more important to you than a roof over your head? If you had to chose, which would it be?

For the next two individuals, it is important to understand the cultural context. One man asks permission to go home and bury his father. His father isn’t dead yet. He is saying "Let me take care of my dad until he’s dead and then I’ll be freed up to follow you." The next man says, “Let me first say farewell to those at my home.” Jesus does not forbid us to say goodbye to family members. I believe the man is saying, “Let me make sure it’s ok with my family. Family comes first, after all – Jesus, surely you understand that. But as soon as I run it by them, and they’re cool with it, I’m with you.”

Jesus won’t have it. He will not accept conditional disciples. There are people who seem ready to become Christians, but they come equipped with certain conditions. People who say, “Very well, I will follow Jesus as long as certain conditions are met. I need assurances of a roof over my head. I have certain obligations and dreams to fulfill and my Christianity can’t interfere with that. My family is important to me and they have to sign off on it, even if they don’t become Christians themselves. I will have to make sure I have their approval.”

When it comes to Christianity, it is important for you to understand that you are not in a position of power to lay down any terms or conditions. You have nothing that God wants. You cannot bargain with him. All you have are things he gave you in the first place. What you can do is surrender to him unconditionally, or you can walk away. Christianity is too narrow for any who will not surrender their lives to Jesus Christ unconditionally and acknowledge that he is top priority in all things.

Fifth, Christianity is too narrow for those who refuse to repent.

The first words of gospel preaching in the Bible are a call to repentance. If you want to be a Christian, if you are thinking about becoming a Christian, you are called to a lifetime of repentance, a lifetime of turning from sin. It will never end. Repentance is not something that you will do just one time and that’s it, you’re perfect and will never sin again. You may by God’s grace defeat alcoholism – praise God, you’re sober now. But there is still the porn habit to deal with. Or your viewing habits have been reformed, but you lie, and must learn to tell the truth even when it is to your disadvantage. Or you have become honest, but you’re mean-spirited and rude, and must learn kindness and goodwill. Or you’re so kind-hearted you wouldn’t hurt a flea, but you’re lazy and leave others to shoulder burdens that your irresponsibility has placed upon them. Or you don’t commit any particular crimes that wound people, but you leave undone a thousand good things that were in your power to accomplish.

As you get closer and closer to the light of Christ, those dark stains on your soul get revealed and you find more and more things that you need to repent of. This process in Scripture is sometimes referred to as being formed in the image of Christ. Galatians 4:19 the Apostle Paul writes, “My little children for whom I am again in the anguish of childbirth until Christ is formed in you!” And in Romans 8:29 he writes, "For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image his Son."

That is the goal, the hope, and the delight of every Christian – to be remade, reshaped, newly formed in the image of Jesus Christ. No matter how long it takes and no matter how painful it is. Christianity is too narrow for those who don’t want that and who make no effort to strive for it.

A number of times, in different sermons, I have alluded to a question that Stuart Briscoe asked a little girl: “If you had to choose, would you rather be happy, or healthy, or holy?” I keep coming back to that question. I ask it of myself. I have it mind to ask it of my grandchildren some day. They’re toddlers now. Maybe when they get older, and the occasion warrants, I would like to be able to ask them that, and see if perhaps a fire burns in their eyes, the desire for goodness, pure, firm, uncontaminated goodness – to have that, to be that – to have one’s evil and evil inclinations expunged. To be made clean, to be made good in the way that God desires us to be good.

That little girl answered Briscoe, “I know the answer is holy, but I’d really rather be happy.” It seems that she was part way there. Because at least she knew what the right answer was, the answer she would give if she were a better person. Perhaps she desires to desire to be holy.

For those who have no such desire, and no desire to desire it, Christianity is too narrow. Christianity does not allow space for continued, rebellious, defiant sin. Such people, according to 1 Corinthians 6, Galatians 5 and Ephesians 5, will not inherit the kingdom of God. Christianity does allow space for the heartbroken, grieving sinner who says, “God be merciful me, and by your grace remake me according to your will. And please keep doing that as long as it takes.”

One last thing. The most direct way to respond to the question “Is Christianity too narrow?” is simply to quote the words of Jesus in the passage in Matthew 7:13-14 where he frankly acknowledged it and explicitly taught that the way is narrow. He said,

“Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few."

Christianity is narrow. Jesus said so himself. But it is not too narrow for those who trust in him and turn their lives over to him. Though the way is narrow, Jesus also said, “I am the way, and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me.”

Believe in Jesus Christ, and for you the way will not be too narrow. Let us pray.

Father in heaven, I thank you for the great promise of Holy Scripture that “the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to strengthen to those whose heart is blameless toward him.” I pray on behalf of those like myself who need more grace than that, for we cannot say that our hearts are blameless. I pray for those of us who find ourselves wanting the delights of your providence but not the repentance of our sin, who dare to lay down conditions upon our discipleship, who reveal pride in our goodness but little shame over our sin. Grant to those who lack it faith in your Son Jesus Christ and an unquenchable desire to be conformed to his image. Thank you that Jesus came to call sinners like us to repentance and righteousness, and that he bore upon himself the curse of our sin so that by a miracle of grace we might be forgiven and cleansed. Amen.