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This is Glendale Presbyterian Church People Moving Power. This tape includes number one in a series of eight lectures on the person and work of Jesus Christ by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. This lecture is titled "You Claim to be God, Prove It." At the conclusion of side number one of this cassette, be sure to turn

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immediately to side number two for the remainder of the message. This tape is copyrighted and all rights are reserved. Any public or commercial use in full or in part requires the advanced written permission of Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. The private use of this material for the spiritual gain of yourselves or other is

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heartily encouraged. This is the first in a series of conversations on the person and work of Jesus. And these conversations have been set up as if they were questions that were addressed to Jesus by a non-believer. And the first question, and the one we want to talk about, is this question. Suppose someone

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were to walk up to Jesus and say, "You claim to be God, prove it." In other words, what we want to talk about is, is Jesus Christ God? Is he in fact divine? Now, I would say at the very outset, and of course I'm not going to speak as Jesus, I would not presume so to do, but we're going to bring many of his words into

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our discussion and many other words about him. And I would begin by making this point, that no character in history has influenced the course of history as has Jesus of Nazareth. A good number of years ago there was a book written that was titled "If" or "History Revisited." And a whole series of authors, each one wrote

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a different chapter, and these chapters concerned how history would be different if certain things had happened in other ways than they did happen. For example, one chapter was titled "What if Lee had won at Gettysburg?" or "What if the Moors had won in Spain?" "What if the Dutch had held on to New Amsterdam?" now

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called New York. "What if Booth had missed Abraham Lincoln?" "What if there had been no Reformation or no discovery of America, no Norman invasion?" "Suppose the Roman Empire had never fallen, what if?" Well, I would submit that the greatest "if" that can be imagined would be this one. "What if Jesus of Nazareth had never

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lived?" I say this because it's my contention that no single personality has influenced the course of civilization as he has. You can look at almost any area of our life and see that this is true. I remember once back in McKeesport, where I served before coming out here, that I walked into the

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sanctuary of our church one day only to discover seated in the sanctuary an older man who had lost both his wife and his only son by death in the course of the preceding year. And he was sitting there alone in the sanctuary. And I went over expecting to find him very disheartened and dejected. Instead of

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that, he was sitting there with an almost beatific smile on his face. And after talking with him for a few minutes, I said, "How is it that you're sitting here alone in this sanctuary and radiating such a peace?" And he gestured around at the church and he said, "Well, I have lost my beloved wife and I have lost my

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only son. But at least all this is still mine." What he was speaking of was the fact that he and his family had been part of that church across the years and this building represented to him, at least in physical terms, what this fellowship of the Saints had meant and what the kinship of all these people

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that still loved him and cared for him and had been especially close to him during this time of bereavement had meant. And it was symbolized to him in the building. Well, there never would have been that building and there never would have been that fellowship had it not been for Jesus of Nazareth. There

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would be no St. Peter's in Rome. There would be no Stephen's Dome in Vienna. Albert Schweitzer would have never sat in the park in Ulm and looked up at the tallest Gothic Cathedral in the world and sent his thoughts even higher than that spire. There would be no place called the Valle de los Coedas in

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remembrance of those who have lost their lives in the service of their country in Spain where that great Cathedral stands. At the end of St. Mark's Square there wouldn't be St. Mark's Cathedral but a pigeon roost. There'd be no poem in stone like Westminster Abbey. There'd be no glorious stained glass as in the Chartres

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Cathedral. There'd be no 800 year old doorknobs on the church in Cologne. The greatest architecture that the world has ever known would not have come into existence if Jesus had not lived. Or go to the finest art galleries in the world and walk those long corridors. What would have happened if Jesus had not lived

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with regard to those corridors? Now I'm talking about where the truly great paintings hang. I heard just the other day that Picasso's studio was robbed and when they went to investigate he told them that he had seen the thieves and was willing to draw a picture of them. So he did and the police promptly went out

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and arrested a mother superior, the Minister of Finance, a washing machine in the Eiffel Tower. Now I'm not talking about that kind of picture but suppose you went to the great galleries. You would discover for example that there would be no paintings by Giotto there, that most of the Raphaels would have

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disappeared, three-quarters of the paintings by Titian would be gone, El Greco's works would be impoverished, there would be no paintings by Fra Angelico, none at all. Michelangelo would never have sculpted the Moses, there would be no David, and there would be no four Pietas. Rembrandt painted

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many pictures of which we still have 1,500 today. Of those 1,500, 800 would vanish in an instant if Jesus had not lived. Rembrandt only owned 15 books, 13 of them were on religious themes and the most read one was the Bible. There'd be no Durer pictures or very few and very few if any by Grunewald. As a matter of

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fact, there might not be any galleries at all because there would be no concept of the dignity of man such as we understand it and the great paintings would not be hanging for common men to see but would be hanging in the palaces of tyrants. And what about music? Well if Jesus had not come, Beethoven would never

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have written the Mount of Olives or the Mises Solemnis, Brahms would have never written the German Requiem. I treasure a letter which I have from the great conductor Bruno Walter in which he says that the German Requiem of Brahms is the heart of Brahms laid bare. We never would have seen that heart. Mahler, though

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influenced from other sources, would have never written the Resurrection Symphony. Verdi would never have composed the Manzoni Requiem. Bach, well the vast majority of his works would be gone in an instant. There would be no King of Kings and Lord of Lords as we sing it in the Messiah. All of that would be gone.

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There'd be no Christmas carols. The Bruckner to Diem would never have been heard. No child would have ever sung Jesus Loves Me and Rossini's Stabat Mater would never even have been conceived. Or think of the great men of history who have been influenced by this Jesus. For a man to be great he must have his feet on

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the earth and his mind in heaven. It's said that Tolstoy used to plow in his bare feet so he could feel the earth coming up between his toes. You want to be down to earth, but you have to have eternity in your heart. It takes both of these things to be a great man. The great tragedy in the lives of most men is not

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that they think too much of themselves, but that they think too little of themselves. That they think of themselves only in terms of the earth and are missing that dimension of eternity. Someone has said that the world is like a great window in a department store with many, many different things in the

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window. But somebody has gotten in there and changed all the price tags so that we pay a lot for what isn't worth very much. And the things that are really treasured have low price tags, but even that we're unwilling to pay. Now the most costly item in the window of course is man himself. And what inflates the value

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of man is the fact that God chose to come for man's sake in this Jesus of Nazareth. But suppose he had not come. Well, Augustine probably would have died as a profligate. We never would have heard of Francis of Assisi, a wastrel in a small town no one even noticed. Dante would never have written the Divine

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Comedy. Milton would never of course have written Paradise Lost. Luther would have probably been an attorney. Knox, a successful Scots businessman. Calvin, most likely a schoolteacher. Albert Schweitzer would have been known as a distinguished doctor, a philosopher, and musician. But he would not have become

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the awesome figure that he was, the reverenced figure that he was. Lincoln? Well, Carl Sandburg delivered the commencement address at Harvard University a few years ago, and in the course of the address he said this to the assembled senior class, "Young gentlemen, I think you need the spirit of

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prayer and humility of Abraham Lincoln, who in the divided house of his day knew what to do because he knew who he was." And where did Lincoln discover who he was? Where did the humility of the man come from? Where did his communion with God and with others find its genesis? In the example, as he himself often said, of

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Jesus of Nazareth. Not only has Jesus played a tremendous role in the lives of great men, but in the lives of common men as well. You see, when God took on flesh and came to dwell with common men, that dignified and lifted common man higher than he had ever been lifted before. Jesus put his hand on the head of a

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leper, and from that single act, the whole development of the hospital as we know it today began. Jesus received little children into his lap, and from that single act, public education as we knew it today had its nativity. And the same with secondary and higher education. The major schools in this country all

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started, the earlier ones, as religious institutions. Women, there is no character in ancient history who exalted the place of woman in life, as did Jesus of Nazareth. Suppose he had never come, that men were still subjugated to the whims of other men. There would have been no Magna Carta. Hamilton and Madison and Jefferson and

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Mill, no Deists in so far as their theology is concerned, would never have come forth with the ethical and moral and governmental systems which was theirs, which were theirs. I would suggest in fact that the Constitution of the United States is utterly inconceivable had Jesus of Nazareth not lived and

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lifted the level and the dignity of mankind. I would argue that I'm far within the mark when I say that no figure has influenced the history of the world as has this figure. Two thousand years after he lived, and still hundreds of thousands of people are meeting around the world tonight in different

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places, in grass huts, in areas of frozen cold, and in living rooms and in classrooms, to talk about him and his influence on life. Now another area in which Jesus has had tremendous influence on history is the influence he's had in the area of morality. This is the most important area for our consideration

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today. No one has suggested a higher moral or ethical system than Jesus did. No one has ever been able to say that Jesus used the wrong word, that there was a better word he might have used at a time than the word he used. No action that Jesus ever did that is recorded is shocking to us as we look at it now.

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There's no point in which we can say that he fell short of the ideal. You're never amazed by the fact that he's great at one moment and less than great at another moment. He is tender but he's never weak. He is strong but he's never coarse. He's holy but he's never servile. He has convictions but he's never

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intolerant. He has enthusiasm but there's never about him the odor of fanaticism. He has passion but without prejudice. There are no false steps. There are no jarring notes. His life is life lived at the highest on the basis of this very morality and ethical system which he proposed. Now I know there are those who

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will disagree with that. George Bernard Shaw said on one occasion that one time in his life Jesus was less than a Christian ought to be. He was referring to the time when Jesus drove the men out of the temple. Some people have said that Socrates died in a more noble manner than Jesus died. In almost every instance

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where there are those who have suggested that others are superior to him in one way or another, in almost every instance the conception rests upon some misconception of a word or an act of Jesus. Shaw for example thought that Jesus actually beat people as he drove them out of the temple although the text

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never suggests that. And of course you can't take these words of Shaw about Jesus very seriously anyway because notice what he says. He says there was at least one time when Jesus was not wholly a Christian. What is he saying? He is saying that Christ did not stand up to what standard? The standard of Christ.

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What he is suggesting is the highest standard is the Christian standard which is of course the life of Christ and so his own words contradict his argument. The concept of love which Jesus brought to the world, loving your enemies, was something altogether new, leads an atheist like Bertrand Russell to say

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that what the world really needs is Christian love. An atheist asserting that. His concept of God, the purity, the holiness of God, leads every other faith to recognize it as superior and other faiths have claimed and stolen from Christianity with regard to its concept of the divine. Now this morality

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established by Jesus is in itself amazing but I want to put on top of it a more amazing fact and that is this, that at no point in Jesus' life as it is recorded do we ever discover him suggesting or implying that he himself ever fell short of the moral and ethical system which he established. In other

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words, he establishes the highest standard that's ever been known and then says, "Which one of you convicteth me of sin?" Now for a man to say I am perfect is not in itself amazing. Hitler thought of himself as being perfect. Anybody can think of themselves as perfect. Whether that thought has any validity or not

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depends on the standard by which he measures his perfection. If your standard is no higher than Hitler's, well then you may describe yourself as perfect and perhaps be perfect by that standard. But Jesus established the highest standard that the world has ever known and then having established that

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standard says, "Which one of you can convict me of ever failing to meet that standard?" It's a very amazing claim and it's a claim which has been accepted by most men. This could be illustrated in a lot of ways. Which one of us, for example, would think of saying something about Jesus the Great? We might talk about

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Frederick the Great, who drank too much, or we might talk about Charles the Great, who was not much more than a thief and a robber, or we might say something about Peter the Great, who ends up a very pathetic man with dreams unfulfilled. But who would ever think of saying Jesus the Great? The very idea is incongruous

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because he stands so much higher than others. And notice please this, that the men who went on a three-year camping trip with him, and that's what the disciples were, they were on a three-year camping trip with Jesus, they never record in their stories about him any failure on his part. Now if you really

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want to know somebody, go on a camping trip with them. Boy, you'll find out more about people in those few days out in the woods than you will at any other time. They were with him for three years. They accused him of no fault. Not even Jesus' enemies ever accused him of any fault. Oh, they suggest that he has broken their

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ritualistic laws, but there's no suggestion that Jesus ever violated their morality or their ethics. The Gospels show Jesus in all kinds of situations. They show him with a very smart man like Nicodemus. They show him with the sick. They show him with little children. They show him with women, nice

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women and women who are not so nice. They show him on a cross. They show him engaged in argumentative situations. They show him in a private home in Bethany. And every picture is flawless. Well, you say to me, "This is the Bible you're quoting and why should we believe the Bible?" Well, we don't have the time to get off into a

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long discussion tonight about the authority of the Bible. But since I've mentioned it, let me at least say this about it. Who could have invented a life like the life of Jesus? If what the Bible says is not true, then answer this for me, please. How did four uneducated Jews of the first century, and their writing

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shows that they were uneducated, how could they sit down and have invented someone like Jesus? Rousseau, the great French philosopher who was not noted for his Christianity, said it would take a Jesus to invent a Jesus. And that's literally true. I'd even go so far as to say this. I cannot conceive of how four

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men like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John could have invented Jesus. And I'll go further and say this. I don't even think that those four men could have ever been anything that they were, insofar as their reputation in history is concerned, had it not been for Jesus. It was Jesus who created them, not those men who created

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Jesus. Who could have created a figure so awesome across the centuries that tonight, if Shakespeare were to walk through the door, we'd all stand up and applaud. Or if Lincoln walked through the door, we might just stand in silence and stare at him. But if Jesus walked through the door, we'd fall on our knees. Now who

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could create that kind of figure? And why would he have been invented? To what purpose? What would have been the goal? If it was a joke or just some kind of literary exercise, they sure paid a terrible price for it. They were sawn in half, they were thrown to wild animals, they were crucified upside down, they

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were boiled in oil, they were skinned alive. That's how those who wrote these stories died. And all they would have had to have done to have avoided this kind of dying was said, "Well, you know, it was all just a joke, just a short story. I thought up one Friday night." But they never said that. They were willing to die

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on the basis of what they had written, when a simple denial would have saved their skins. I'm not going to enter into a debate about the authority of Scripture, but I would ask you to notice that no other religion on the face of the earth has ever had as much prophecy in it as Christianity. Most religions

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will not venture into the realm of the prophetic, but the Bible doesn't hesitate to do so. And its record with regard to prophecy, well, is utterly beyond one's power to imagine. Duke Frederick of Germany once said, "In a single sentence, give me a proof of God." And Luther replied, "I won't need a sentence, just two

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words. The Jews." Look at the history of the Jewish people, the prophetic history as it is laid out in the document which is the Scriptures, and how it has been fulfilled. There are over 300 references in the Old Testament to the person of Jesus, and out of those 300, all but one had been fulfilled. The only one

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unfulfilled, his imminent return. Now the chances of those things being fulfilled in one life, just by accident, the chances of that are 1 to 84 raised to the 123rd power. That's an inconceivable number, an unwritable number. Archaeology, of course, could never finally prove the authority of Scripture, but on the other hand,

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archaeology has never disproved the authority of Scripture. I won't pursue this line further, but what is there, what reason is there to deny what Scripture says? There was no point in inventing it. They are not bribed, they were not paid any amount of money, they died on the basis of what they had written and for

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what they had written. Why then do we contest what is said? Scripture says this about this Jesus, that he was an infinitely sublime moral teacher who denied that he ever sinned, and both his friends and his enemies also testified to the fact that he did not sin. And Scripture says one more

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thing about this Jesus. It said that he did miracles. Now, of course, as soon as you say something about miracles, well, a lot of people get uptight right away. That immediately brings up questions in some people's minds. Some people, as a matter of fact, just rule out the question of miracles. Oh, miracles, that's

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so much hogwash, and they won't even consider the question. Now, that kind of person, of course, does not merit a response. You see, they throw out miracle on the grounds that it's not scientific, but I would suggest to you that the basic premise of science is that if there's any evidence for something, you

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must test it out. And what they're doing by denying the possibility of miracle is they're not putting it to the test. They are denying it without experiment. Very unscientific. The other basic principle of science is that you must go at the problem which is before you without prejudice. And when an individual says

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that they won't even examine the evidence, miracle, hogwash, that's prejudice, and that's very unscientific. Now, there are others who rule out miracles, and they do it on what they would call a scientific basis. Their argument is usually the one advanced by the great Scots philosopher, Hume. Now, his

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argument was built on the principle of regularity. He looked at the whole history of nature and mankind, and he said, "There is more evidence for regular process in nature than there is for irregular process. There's more evidence for regularity than irregularity, and therefore there can be no miracles."

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Because a miracle, of course, is an interruption into the regular. Look, he says, at the normal course of events. Everything goes along regularly. This is the normal process. Therefore, on the basis of this, he asserts there is no irregularity. There were no miracles. Now, that argument fails for two very obvious

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reasons. In the first place, a miracle, and asserting its reality, in no point disagrees with natural law or natural process. When you say you believe in miracles, you are not denying the principle of regularity. What you are denying is the principle of regularity in every single instance. If you think

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about it for a moment, you recognize that this is basic. There wouldn't even be such a thing as a miracle if there wasn't regularity. A miracle, by definition, is that which departs from the regular. If everything was happening irregularly all the time, there wouldn't be any miracles. Everything would be a

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miracle. There wouldn't be anything other than miracle. Everything would be a surprise, you see. The mere fact that things happen normally, on a regular basis, and then something comes along, zap, which departs from the regular, we say that's miraculous. So you can't even have a miracle unless you say at the

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very outset there is a normal regular process. So when Hume says that the existence of miracle denies regular process, the Christian responds, you can't even have a miracle unless you assert regular process. What we are arguing is that regular process does not apply in every single instance. And the other

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point at which Hume's argument fails is this. Regularity is not an argument against irregularity. What we're simply saying is the normal may be regular. True. But because the normal is regular, that does not mean that there can be, logically, never be any departure from the regular. As soon as you admit

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the existence of God, and that's not a question which we're going into in this conversation, as soon as you admit the existence of God, you are admitting the existence of something other than the creation. God made it. God is other than creation. As soon as you've admitted that, then that God can act upon that creation

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in any way that he sees fit, regularly or irregularly. And what we are suggesting is that the fact that things happen in normal process most of the time does not mean logically that they have always happened that way. Now, some people, some Christians, try to support what I'm saying now by referring to quantum

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physics. And quantum physics, as you know, this development in physical science asserts the principle of indeterminacy, which means that occasionally things happen in nature on a non-determined, on a non-regular, on an irregular, on an undetermined basis. That's the principle of quantum physics. So some Christians

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say, "Look, there it is in the world of physics right there. Indeterminacy, irregularity. So a miracle can be indeterminate and irregular." Frankly, I don't think that quantum physics contributes much to the Christian idea of miracle for two reasons. First of all, the principle of indeterminacy has never been

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proved. We might find out later that indeterminacy is itself determined. And if that were so, then the argument would go right out the window. And secondly, if we try to say that Jesus' miracles were expressions of indeterminacy, then we're also saying that Jesus was a fraud. You see, an indetermined event, such as is

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used in quantum physics, is something that happens by fluke. And if we're saying that the miracles are flukes, then we're saying that Jesus just happened to be there one day when it was possible for a man to walk on the water. That he did it, and then looked at the fluke and looked at other men and said, "That didn't happen

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as a fluke. It happened because I willed it to happen." And that makes Jesus a fraud. That means Jesus took advantage of a situation which occurred and claimed that he had done it, when in point of fact it was simply a principle of irregularity in nature. Now, I don't think it's necessary for us to go to quantum

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physics to try to defend the possibility of miracle. No one denies the fact that the Scriptures say that Jesus did miracles. Now, if that's so, why would they say that about him if he hadn't done them? Did someone pay them to say them about him? Could anyone pay you enough to be crucified? Because

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asserting he did miracles led to their being crucified. Did they do it to please Christ? Sort of made up little stories about him to make him feel good? Well, if they did, certainly wouldn't have worked. Because Jesus gave the highest morality the world has ever known, and that morality absolutely forbids untruth.

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Would he have been happy by stories told about him right then at that moment, which were obviously not true? Not at all. Could this be sentimentalism? Did they do this to make themselves feel good? Well, if that is true, they were willing to die for those kinds of feelings. And why were they never contradicted? They didn't

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assert that he did miracles off on a corner somewhere. They did it to the very people before whom it happened. Notice, even his enemies never denied that Jesus did miracles. They said he did them by the power of the devil, but they didn't deny that this power was his. Well, maybe the disciples were mistaken. Maybe

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they just thought things happened, but they didn't really happen that way. Fourth, and written opposing documents. Why can we not produce any documents from the period which specifically contest the fact that Jesus of Nazareth did miracles? Now, there are some who say that Jesus actually didn't have miraculous powers,

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but that he was so smart that he understood natural laws that we don't understand yet. What he did was really quite natural, and if we get smart enough, someday we'll learn how to do these things too, and then they won't seem like they're miracles to us at all. Well, if that's true, that Jesus really was just

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smarter than we were, then, well, then we're up against some very hard situations. First of all, we make Jesus into a liar because Jesus said he did miracles, and if it was really just a matter of wisdom and not a matter of miraculous power, then he was downright lying. And if he was lying, why was he

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never accused of deceit? And if he was lying, how could a liar have produced the greatest moral code that the world has ever known, the most sublime ethical system that man has ever conceived of? And also, if this was just his knowledge, why didn't he tell other people about it? The keynote of Jesus' life is sharing

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what he knew, what he was, what he did. Are we going to suggest that at this crucial place in his life, he suddenly decided to keep everything a secret? It's contrary to everything we know about him. Not only that, but this is even more important. That kind of an argument just substitutes one miracle for another. What

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it's really suggesting is that it's possible for us to know a word that we can utter, and suddenly five loaves and two fishes will be enough food to feed 5,000 people. There's just a formula we have to be able to suggest, and we can rise again from the dead. All we have to do is know how to do it, and we can

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walk on the top of the water. You see, on the very face of it, such knowledge is so much beyond our conception that it demands just as far a stretching of your imagination as it does to accept the fact that he did miracles in the first place. But of course, other people have done miracles. Other religions claim that

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individuals who are great spiritual giants in them did the miraculous. Other men in the Bible did miracles. Elijah causes the sun to stand still. Elijah causes the flames to fall from heaven. Jeremiah causes an axe head to swim. Elijah brings a child back to life. Paul says rise up, or Peter says rise up and

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walk, and a man rise up and walk. It's the fact that a man does miracles, make him God, and remember that's the central concern that we have here, was Jesus divine? Well, I would submit to you that in this instance the situation is crucially different, and here is the crux and the conclusion of the whole argument.

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Jesus did miracles, but remember, Jesus also claimed to be God. Now, there's no questioning that fact. Jesus claimed to be God. He said before Abraham was born, I already existed. He preached a sermon from the Old Testament and said every word here is fulfilled in me. The word he used to describe himself most frequently

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was the Son of Man, which is a representation of the divine. At Caesarea Philippi, Peter said, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God," and Jesus says, "You're dead right." In John 10, he says, "I and the Father are one." He says to Philip in the upper room, "He who has seen me has seen the Father." He lays claim

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without a moment's hesitation to all of the attributes of deity. God, we think of as being existing forever. Jesus says, "Before the foundation of the world I was." God is all-powerful. Jesus says, "All power is given to me in heaven and on earth." God is infallible. He can't make a mistake. Jesus says, "Heaven and earth

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will pass away, but my words will never pass away. I am the truth." God is everywhere, the omnipresence of God. Jesus says, "Lo, I am with you always, even unto the uttermost part of the earth." God is perfect. Jesus says, "Which of you can convict me of sin?" God alone has the right to judge. Jesus says, "The Father

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judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment to the Son." God alone has the power to forgive sins. Jesus says, "Thy sins are forgiven thee." You know, that's really a comic one when you think about it. Suppose, for example, that you were to lean over right now and hit Bill Serafini in the face, just punch him as

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hard as you possibly could, and he's sitting over there with the blood running out of his mouth, broken teeth, smashed gums, and everything else, you see. Now, if he were to look at you and say, "I forgive you," we would all be moved, and we would think that's a beautiful thing on his part. But suppose while he's

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sitting over there picking himself up off the floor, I look at you and say, "I forgive you." Everybody would do just what they're doing, laughing, you see. How do I get involved? It's his mouth that was hurt, you see. But Jesus, Jesus looks at what one man does to another man, and then looking at that man says, "I forgive you." That's a

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fantastic claim. Only God, the Creator of men, could make such a claim, and he makes nothing less than that claim. Jesus claimed to be divine. Notice this. Some people say, "Well, I'm not interested in anything in the Bible except the Sermon on the Mount." All right, take the Sermon on the Mount. In the Sermon on the Mount,

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Jesus says, "Who will enter heaven?" Only God can make that kind of statement. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says that all the prophets died for his sake. Only God could make a statement like that. What would you think if I said, "Isaiah came to minister, live, and die for me, Bruce? I was his principal concern." Jesus

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says about the whole Old Testament, "It's great, but I say unto you," Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, "My word stands forever." Forever, eternally. Only God could make a statement like that. Even the enemies of Jesus testified to the fact that he claimed to be divine, because that's the reason they crucified

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him. He was crucified on the charge of blasphemy. They say in John 10, "You being a man, claim to be God." That was the very charge that was leveled against him. Now, bearing in mind the fact that Jesus could do miracles, and bearing in mind that this Jesus claimed to be God, I present to you the crucial question. If

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the power to do miracles comes from God alone and can be given only by him, would God have given such power to a liar? Would God have given the power to do miracles, and Scripture and the friends and the enemies of Jesus, all the testimony that we have, not refuted at

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any point, not in contradiction with scientific principle, not in contradiction with philosophical argument, Jesus did miracles and Jesus claimed to be God. Would Jesus have been given the power to do miracles if he was a liar, if he was a fraud? Would God, in fact, have given that capacity and that

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ability to one whom he knew was going around all the time posing to be him, an imposter? See, we're not only confronted with the difficulty when Jesus claimed to be God, a twofold difficulty, we're confronted with a threefold difficulty. So you only have three alternatives when you read the fact that

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Jesus claimed to be God. You must say he is a liar, in which case a liar produced the greatest ethical and moral system the world has ever known, and a liar was given the power by God to do the miraculous. Or you can say he's a lunatic, he's insane, in which case you must argue that an insane man created the highest

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ethic the world has ever known, and an insane man was given the ability by God to do miracles. Or you must say that what he is saying is right, and if you say that what he's saying is right, then it squares up with everything that everybody else back then was saying about him. The centurion who crucifies

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him says, "Surely this man is the Son of God." John the Baptist says, "Behold the Lamb of God, I'm not worthy to unlatch his sandals." The multitude say, "Never a mere man spoke like this man." Thomas says, "My Lord and my God." Peter says, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." John says, "In the beginning was the Word,

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and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh." Jesus. The whole existence of the church is predicated, predicated on the affirmation of his deity. Once a man named Bronson Alcott said, "I feel so close to God that I can say, I and the Father are one." And one of his friends said, "Well, that means

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the only difference between you and Jesus is that he was able to get most of the people in the world to believe him." And of course that's true. For more people today in the world hold to the full deity of Jesus Christ than hold to any other religious doctrine known to the mind of man. Yet having said all this,

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finally enough, I end up by asserting that I don't believe Jesus is divine because of any of these things. Really. I believe that Jesus is divine because I have experienced him personally in my own life. This one who lived 20 centuries ago has moved in my own life. I can remember a night when I was 14 years old,

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sitting in room 202 of Hillside Dormitory on the campus of a small college in western Pennsylvania. I was attending a youth conference. I had been to a service that night in which a man, whose name I remember, Frank Lawrence, preached a sermon, not a word of which I can recall. I could not tell you the

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title, the subject, the theme. I could tell you nothing about it at all. When the service was over, I went back to my room. We each carried with us that night a candle, and I worked very hard to get that candle all the way back to the room, still lighted. That's what I was thinking about the whole way home, getting that

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lighted candle home. And I made it. Pour a little wax on the windowsill, set the base of the candle in the wax, and then proceeded to get ready for bed. From that point until the next morning, I cannot tell you anything that happened except this, that in those hours in which I do not remember going to bed, and in

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fact awakened the next morning not in bed, but seated on the edge of my bed fully clothed, that night I met him face to face. I had an experience of him so real that it is as clear to me now and as indescribable to me now as it was the morning after it happened. And that next morning I knew that I was to be a

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minister of the gospel. And there was only one time in my life when I ever wavered in that, and that was the result of my own sin, not my lack of confidence in him. Or, I don't have to go back to when I was 14. I can go back to an experience just a few weeks ago in which I was ridiculed, belittled, the only white

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man in the midst of hundreds of black people, pushed, shoved, spat upon, waiting for an airplane for 25 and a half hours, and then when the plane came, not being permitted to board it. I walked away from that counter with God as my witness, without bitterness, without hatred, without anger, without even a sense of

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frustration. That's not because of any sanctification on my part. It's because of the fact that during that entire experience I was overwhelmed by the conscious presence of this Jesus, who lived in the flesh 2,000 years ago. So if you ask me to prove it, I can advance to you arguments from philosophy and

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science, and I can debate with you logically and lay out propositions that show his influence on the world, his morality, his purity, his miraculous powers, and where the logical sum of those things brings you. But the testimony which to me is most conclusive is the fact that a man who some say

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died, was buried, and his body has decayed and mingled with the Syrian Saints 20 centuries ago is so real that I can talk to him, so real I can experience him. That is to me the proof conclusive, that he is who he says he is. And I invite anyone who questions his deity to live for 30 days as if he was

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who he claims to be. Live for 30 days on the basis of what I call the Christological hypothesis, that he is who he claims to be. Give him that chance to move into your life, and at the end of 30 days make your judgment, for he'll come. Albert Schweitzer concludes his book, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, with

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these words. He comes to us across the mists of history, but it is not until we serve him, it is not until we give ourselves to him, it is not until we lose ourselves in him, that we discover who he really is. you

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