JUST A THOUGHT… 5/10/13 C.S. Lewis was an Oxford medieval historian and he is known primarily among Christian thinkers, (whether or not one considers him to be a genuine Christian or not – a subject of which there is much debate, especially on many Christian FB pages and websites), for outlining the following argument on the Deity of Jesus of Nazareth in a series of BBC Radio discussions, which were later transcribed into the popular book, Mere Christianity. In Lewis’ own words this is how he outlined his ‘Deity of Christ’ argument: "I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God." On this matter I agree wholeheartedly with Lewis, Jesus did not leave us with a choice concerning Him being a wise teacher, a man ahead of His times, a moral compass for us to establish more just societies and whatnot. No, based on the Lewis Tri-lemma Jesus was, by His own words and deeds and the words of those who knew Him personally, strongly asserting a claim to be God Himself in the flesh. He did this by claiming to have authority to forgive sins, (mysteriously forgiving people even before the crucifixion), “And when he saw their faith, he said unto him, Man, thy sins are forgiven thee.” [Luke 5:20] claiming to have always existed, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.” [John 1:1-3 & our base text above: 8:56-59] and claiming that He intended to return to judge the world at the end of time: “Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by [that] man whom he hath ordained; [whereof] he hath given assurance unto all [men], in that he hath raised him from the dead.” [Acts 17:31] These are just some of the reasons Lewis argued against the possibility of Jesus merely being a good moral teacher ahead of his time, or one of the many Avatars of the Age, as is claimed by many Buddhists, Hindus and New Agers today. Please allow me to simplify the issue even more so as we can move on with our study; the fact that Jesus claimed to be the only way to God, as we see in the Gospel of John Chapter 14, is a vital truth to the people of this world. It is, without a doubt, the big E on the Eye Chart, the elephant in the room doing cartwheels, the crazy monkey with a wrench and that terribly annoying spanner in the works all rolled up into one being driven by wild horses on steroids. If Jesus is lying about His claims to being the only way to the Father, he has both successfully and wilfully led countless millions to Hell to be tormented for all eternity, an act which would make Him the most evil man ever to have lived, in fact we would have to once again agree with C.S. Lewis and say that Jesus was in fact Satan, for only Satan could concoct a lie so great that it would fill all of Hell to the hilt. Lewis argues, and rather well at that, that these claims of Jesus logically exclude the possibility that our Lord was some kind of ‘great moral teacher’ because it is impossible for anyone to make such outrageous claims and be thought of as a ‘great, moral teacher’ unless He actually is God. Therefore the problem for people who try to settle for Jesus as a man ahead of His times is really quite simple, unless He actually is God and can save people from their sins, He is the most amoral of beings, therefore the idea rules itself out by the use of sound logic in the same manner that Existential Relativists destroy their own philosophy of there being no absolutes by making the absolute statement that there are no absolutes. The wages of sin is death we are told in scripture and someone rather special was going to be needed in order that there might be a way out of that tragic inevitability, someone perfect, someone spiritually without blemish, a complete person, a prophesied person, a person utterly without sin, in short, a person who would need to be 100% God and 100% Man willing to be brought like a lamb to the slaughter for the redemption of the adopted sons and daughters of God. Shalom AGD
Posted on: Sat, 05 Oct 2013 09:55:30 +0000
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