Thursday, December 14, 2006
Growing up I had heard the Christmas and Easter stories, but they never made much of a connection with me. The reason being, I treated them like stories never really trying to understand the significance. The facts I related in my last 2 posts changed that. For the first time in my life I took a serious look what the Bible had to say about Jesus Christ. That leads me to the third point. Jesus claimed to be God.
Normally, when someone makes such a claim we write them off as nuts. Jesus was taken seriously by both those who believed Him and His enemies. John relates an encounter between Jesus and one of Israel's leading scholars in the third chapter of his biography of Christ. Nicodemus gives us an indication of what his peers were thinking when he said, "Teacher we all know that God has sent You as a teacher; for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with Him." Two years later most of Nicodemus's colleagues had changed their minds and were plotting to kill Jesus. Interestingly, their strategy was to kill Him rather than expose Him as a fraud. Why? At no time did any of the opposition deny that Jesus was doing legitimate miracles because the miracles were real. If they could have exposed Jesus as a con man they would have. What they did try was to claim He worked miracles by the power of Satan rather than by God's power.
I realize there is the temptation to say these were ignorant people easily fooled because they did not know what we know today. The reality is they were quite knowledgeable about how things worked. They had the engineering and math, but lacked the technology to fully exploit what they knew. It is really quite amazing what people of that period were able to do with the technology they had. Anyway, when Jesus healed a man who had been blind from birth it was not possible to say it was a trick. At forty years of age and a life of begging the blind man was too well known for anyone to dismiss this healing.
Believing in the possibility opens the eyes to seeing evidence of the reality. As I said some time ago, I was open to the possibility, even the likelyhood of God being real. The predictions of Daniel and Micah being fulfilled at the right time in the right place by a man who claimed to be God and backed up the claim with miracles His enemies could not deny was enough for me to take a chance on this being real. The fourth point of Christianity which I will cover in my next post was the closer.
I have spent much of my life refining my understanding of Jesus Christ studying both His supporters and those who oppose Him. I figure God can stand up to scrutiny and by extension Jesus can as well. I have uncovered things that are hard to understand, accept and go against my proclivities. That should not be surprising, the mind that could conceive of and create the universe transcends human thought and experience. What I have not found is proof that Jesus was not who He claimed to be. Quite the opposite, the evidence is in His favor.
Normally, when someone makes such a claim we write them off as nuts. Jesus was taken seriously by both those who believed Him and His enemies. John relates an encounter between Jesus and one of Israel's leading scholars in the third chapter of his biography of Christ. Nicodemus gives us an indication of what his peers were thinking when he said, "Teacher we all know that God has sent You as a teacher; for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with Him." Two years later most of Nicodemus's colleagues had changed their minds and were plotting to kill Jesus. Interestingly, their strategy was to kill Him rather than expose Him as a fraud. Why? At no time did any of the opposition deny that Jesus was doing legitimate miracles because the miracles were real. If they could have exposed Jesus as a con man they would have. What they did try was to claim He worked miracles by the power of Satan rather than by God's power.
I realize there is the temptation to say these were ignorant people easily fooled because they did not know what we know today. The reality is they were quite knowledgeable about how things worked. They had the engineering and math, but lacked the technology to fully exploit what they knew. It is really quite amazing what people of that period were able to do with the technology they had. Anyway, when Jesus healed a man who had been blind from birth it was not possible to say it was a trick. At forty years of age and a life of begging the blind man was too well known for anyone to dismiss this healing.
Believing in the possibility opens the eyes to seeing evidence of the reality. As I said some time ago, I was open to the possibility, even the likelyhood of God being real. The predictions of Daniel and Micah being fulfilled at the right time in the right place by a man who claimed to be God and backed up the claim with miracles His enemies could not deny was enough for me to take a chance on this being real. The fourth point of Christianity which I will cover in my next post was the closer.
I have spent much of my life refining my understanding of Jesus Christ studying both His supporters and those who oppose Him. I figure God can stand up to scrutiny and by extension Jesus can as well. I have uncovered things that are hard to understand, accept and go against my proclivities. That should not be surprising, the mind that could conceive of and create the universe transcends human thought and experience. What I have not found is proof that Jesus was not who He claimed to be. Quite the opposite, the evidence is in His favor.
