Was Jesus just a Great Moral Teacher?

         You would think that it would be a more common occurrence to find people who just really don’t like Jesus. It’s an interesting phenomenon: there are plenty of people who are ready to speak badly about the church or religion or even the apostle Paul or the Old Testament, but no one seems to have anything bad to say about Jesus. The common refrain from people seems to be that they think that Jesus was a great moral teacher. Even many who aren’t Christians claim to be inspired by his ethics of love, service, and sacrifice.

            One possible conclusion to draw from this is that if so many people still like Jesus, even as they dislike the church, then the reason more aren’t going to church is because the church is not acting enough like Jesus. And there is certainly a lot of truth there. The church’s witness is harmed greatly by its hypocrisy and sin. But another conclusion that we could draw is that people simply have a misguided and incomplete view of who Jesus was and what he taught, because he is often quite consistent with the teachings of Paul and the Old Testament and the church.

            If the public had a more complete view of Jesus, then they’d know we can’t just relegate Jesus to being a great moral teacher. Listen to C.S. Lewis’ ‘Lunatic, Liar, or Lord dilemma’. Jesus claims to be God (John 1:1, 8:58, 10:30, etc.). Therefore, Jesus must either be telling the truth, and he really is God. Or, if he’s not God, then he must either be lying, knowing that he’s not God and saying otherwise; or, he must be insane, truly thinking he’s God, but being woefully mistaken. Lewis put it this way, “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.”

Decide today where you stand on Jesus: either crown him as Lord or cast him out as a fraud. Be hot or cold, do not be lukewarm (Revelation 3:16). Investigate for yourself, and like the ex-atheist Lewis, you may come to the conclusion that Jesus did not have the ramblings of a lunatic, nor the motivation to uphold a lie (when upholding it would get him crucified), nor the moral disposition to deceive. Similarly, the many eyewitnesses to Jesus’ resurrection had no motivation to lie (their testimony got many of them killed); and group psychosis would’ve been exceedingly unlikely. They too must’ve been telling the truth. And thus, “however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem… He was and is God.”

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