I was talking with one of the guys from church the other day. He said sometimes he has a hard time believing that Jesus is God. I asked him: “What if Jesus was like he’s described in The Bible, but he wasn’t God, and he knew he wasn’t God?” I suggested that he would have been a very bad guy if he did that. His apparent wisdom and power to do miracles would have had an evil source. He would have been pretending to love even the most cast out people in his environment.
We agreed that Jesus doesn’t seem like that kind of person.
Then I asked him to consider a different possibility. A guy named Jesus was a unique individual, and a lot of people thought he was going to change the world, but things didn’t work out. Jesus was killed, and as time went on, they began to make him into a legend. Many people believe that is what happened, but I think Holy Spirit showed me a huge problem with that: we cannot even make up someone as good and great as Jesus of Nazareth. In the thousands of years, before and after Jesus’ life on earth, people have been making up heroes, from Achilles to Beowulf, from Luke Skywalker to Harry Potter, and none of them are anywhere even close in character, power, wisdom, and compassion to Jesus.
Harry Potter loves his friends. He stands against evil and saves the world–7 times, but he doesn’t eat dinner at Voldemort’s house. Luke Skywalker can move things with his mind and trick dumb creatures into following his will, but he doesn’t feed 5,000 people with a padawan’s lunch. Winnie-the-Pooh is so kind that he invites homeless Piglet to come live with him, but we all know Pooh is not very smart, and he cannot walk on water.
How is it that in all these thousands of years, no writer has been able to conceive of someone greater than Jesus Christ? Jesus is the greatest, and, what the Bible says about him, it’s all true. Colossians 1:15-20 has a great praise report about who Jesus is: “He is the image of the invisible God. . . supreme over all creation. . . all things were created through him and for him. . . he holds all creation together. . . the fulness of God was pleased to dwell in him. . . through him God reconciled everything to himself. He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth by means of Christ’s blood on the cross.”
