As You Investigate Jesus
The story of the Ethiopian man in Acts 8 shows us two sides of the gospel’s advance: seeking, in the character of the Ethiopian man, and speaking, in the character of Philip.
The Ethiopian man is what we might call the seeker exemplar. We see this is the activities in which he was engaged (being around other Christians and reading the Bible), and then, mainly, in the question he asked. After reading Isaiah 53, he asked Philip, “About whom, I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” (Acts 8:34).
Basically, he asks: Who is Jesus?
That is the question. As I mentioned in the sermon Sunday, notice he doesn’t say to Philip, “About how many years, I ask you, is the age of the earth?” That’s not what he says. He doesn’t ask him the Christian position on national policy, or even how Philip defines marriage. Now, if he would have asked these things, Philip would have continued the conversation, and I’m sure they will eventually get to these topics. But the first question — the main question — is “who is Isaiah talking about?” Who is Jesus Christ?
And that’s the main question because everything else about everything hangs and falls on that answer.
My encouragement, therefore, to anyone interested in God or spiritual things is to investigate Jesus. You really should look there. See what this man said about himself, and what he did, and how he changed the world. Below you’ll find a handful of resources I recommend, but before we get there, I want to give you what is, in my opinion, the go-to rationale to study Jesus intently even if you’re not a Christian.
The rationale is original to C.S. Lewis, and is put forward in glistening clarity by John Stott in his book, Why I am a Christian.
Jesus made three relational claims: 1) to be the Son of God; 2) to be the fulfillment of ancient Hebrew prophecy; and 3) to have authority over human life.
Stott writes of Jesus,
In relation to the Old Testament Scriptures, he was their fulfilment. In relation to God the Father, he enjoyed the unique intimacy of sonship. In relation to human beings, he claimed authority to be their saviour and their judge. Three words encapsulate his claims – fulfilment, intimacy and authority. He claimed to be the Christ of Scripture, the Son of God and the saviour and judge of the world.
‘My reading of the Gospels’, wrote Hugh Martin, a New Testament scholar, ‘after the closest scrutiny and making all allowances, is that Jesus never ceased in word and act to claim lordship over the hearts and lives of men. We may regret that, we may resent it, but the fact cannot be denied. The evidence in all our documents is incontrovertible.’ What, then, do we make of his claims?
One thing we cannot do (though many people try to) is ignore them. If we sweep them under the carpet, they have the disconcerting habit of popping out again. They are woven into the texture of the Gospels; we cannot pretend they are not there. We cannot dress Jesus up as a nice, harmless little teacher of ethical platitudes. The situation is very simple. The claims of Jesus are either true or false. If they are false, they could be deliberately false (in which case he was a liar, an impostor) or they could be involuntarily false (in which case he was deluded). Yet neither possibility appears at all likely. Jesus hated religious pretence or hypocrisy. He was a person of such integrity that it is hard to believe he was a charlatan. As for having a fixed delusion about himself, there certainly are psychotic people who imagine they are the Queen of Sheba, Julius Caesar, the Emperor of Japan or some other VIP. But one thing is fatal to this theory in regard to Jesus. It is that deluded people delude nobody but themselves. You have only to be in their presence for two or three minutes before you know that they are withdrawn from reality and living in a world of fantasy. But not Jesus. He has succeeded in persuading (or deluding) millions of people, for the very good reason that he seems to be what he claimed to be. There is no dichotomy between his character and his claims.
This dilemma has been forcefully expressed by C. S. Lewis:
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 a 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 patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
This is the paradox of Jesus. His claims sound like the ravings of a lunatic, but he shows no sign of being a fanatic, a neurotic or, still less, a psychotic. On the contrary, he comes before us in the pages of the Gospels as the most balanced and integrated of human beings. (Kindle Locations 417–433).
Recommended Books
Why I Am a Christian, by John Stott
Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, by N.T. Wright
Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor's Journey into Christian Faith, by Rosaria Butterfield
Fifty Reasons Why Jesus Came to Die, by John Piper
The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, by Tim Keller
Raised?: Finding Jesus by Doubting the Resurrection, by Jonathan Dodson
